TikTok’s “For You” page runs on one rule. The more engagement a video gets, the more people end up viewing it. This system has led teens to illegal activities since the app was launched. In 2021, the Devious Licks trend pushed the youth to steal and vandalize school property for views, racking up over 235 million views before TikTok responded with a hashtag ban and a community guideline reminder, stopping nobody.
In March, a video of an 18-year-old sprinting through the lobby of a Church of Scientology building in Hollywood went viral, racking up over 90 million views on TikTok alone. Within days, dozens of copycat videos flooded social media to the point where the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) confirmed five trespassing reports at the Scientology Hollywood departments. Staff members were allegedly knocked down repeatedly during this chaos. For the people filming these videos, it was just a funny video, but legally, it’s a misdemeanor. In California, trespassing is classified as a crime punishable by up to $1,000 in fines or six months in jail if no aggression is involved. For aggravated trespassing, both the fine and jail time double, rocketing up to $2,000 and one year, respectively. This isn’t just a one-off trend, as one may assume; this runs deeper and has stuck around for a long time.
In 2024, South Carolina police investigated a reported “growing national TikTok trend” where teens challenged each other to kick in the front doors of random homes. Speeding challenges have also circulated the “CarTok” fandoms of TikTok, where people of all ages film themselves driving at reckless speeds for engagement. A 2025 analysis found nearly 100 deaths and tens of thousands of emergency room visits every year were linked to social media challenges like these, with year-over-year increases. Every trend follows the same pipeline: Video goes viral, people copy it, then consequences and/or limits only appear once the harm is done.
The responsibility for this cycle rests on the platforms, not the users. TikTok, Instagram, and X (Formerly known as Twitter) all follow the same algorithm priorities. Engagement, potential, and timing. From an outside perspective, little to no thought was given to safety, as their priorities seem to rest on time spent in apps. Recommendation systems often push increasingly extreme content to maintain attention, and while platforms like TikTok explicitly state they prohibit dangerous behaviors in their community guidelines, their systems continue to promote these actions.
None of this goes unnoticed by any of the platforms. With hundreds of thousands of employees in any given department, someone has to see these trends come up and allow them to spread. The trends are documented, the arrests are public, and this pattern is over a decade old now. Instagram acknowledged that removing harmful content requires “large human efforts,” which speaks volumes. The technology to amplify a trespassing video to impressionable teens already exists and works perfectly fine, yet the effort to stop or limit it is somehow too much to ask.
