About four and a half years ago, Voxitatis first noted the viral nature of the “Tide Pod Challenge,” which, on social media, “challenged” young people to eat the laundry packets that are not fit for human consumption.
The TikTok platform has very much taken over the “challenge” market on social media and provides several daily challenges for its users, one of the latest being to post a video of yourself eating super spicy potato chips.
Dana Perez, the assistant principal at Rogers Park Middle School in Danbury, Connecticut, got an email from her district about the super spicy chip challenge, advising her that some young people were experiencing severe abdominal pain and vomiting after eating the chips. “We’re over the chips. Don’t do it. I don’t want to see them,” she announced during a lunch period recently, Education Week reports.
Short of prohibiting the use of cellphones in school, there’s not much that can be done to prevent the spread of these challenges on the very popular social media platform. But they are known to be disruptive to school function and often dangerous for young people, whose self-esteem is often tied in unhealthy ways to how many “likes” or “hearts” they get.
Some apps are trying to effect positive change. BeReal, for instance, encourages users to take selfies at random times of the day (it sends an alert) and post them without the possibility of applying filters.
“The spread of BeReal encourages teens and adults worldwide to embrace their authentic selves by ‘being real’ when using social media platforms,” writes Valeria Bigott in the student newspaper at Gulliver Prep in Miami. “How does BeReal go about this? The catch of the app is ‘total randomness,’ going off at any given time throughout the day. Users click the notification when it’s time to ‘BeReal’ and are then given two minutes to capture a picture of themselves and what they are doing through the front and back cameras.”
Other Florida student newspaper have covered the app in recent weeks, including
- Trinity Prep in Winter Park (by Peyton Aich)
- Miami Palmetto in Pinecrest Village (by Amy-Grace Shapiro and Alex James)
- Newsome High School in Lithia (by Margaret Metz)
- Our Lady of Lourdes Academy in Miami (Bella Nuñez)
Max Belyantsev writes about the app for students at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Maryland. He’s joined by Jelissa Karnel at Wootton High School in Potomac and Abby Conrad at Centennial High School in Ellicott City.
“I think [BeReal will] make people comfortable to post on other social [media] without relying on filters and caring about people’s opinions,” one sophomore at Centennial was quoted as saying. “I still feel like it’s the most chill social media app. I just hope that that doesn’t change,” another student said.
Chill is good, and apps like BeReal might just mitigate the outsize importance teens allow social media upvotes to have on their self-esteem. Whether it can keep them from eating super spicy potato chips and suffering severe abdominal pain on camera is a completely different question.
