(LifeSiteNews) — A formerly gender-confused individual who now speaks out against transgenderism said that TikTok encourages people to identify as transgender.
“I was spending eight hours a day on TikTok,” Oli London told Fox News Digital. “I was really, really addicted. Now, I barely use it, and I’m so much happier.” London, who is British, previously identified as a Korean woman.
“You think, ‘Oh, wow, look at them, they’re popular, they’re getting love, they’re getting validation’ and I thought, ‘Maybe I can feel validated,'” he said.
London told Fox News that the algorithm for the Chinese Communist Party-linked app encourages transgender content.
“They [TikTok] check what you’re interested in, and they push and feed you videos related to your interests,” he said. “If you’re a kid that maybe stumbles across a video that’s about gender ideology, and you watch the whole video for 15 seconds, TikTok will remember that and just keep showing you the same kind of content.”
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“That was what happened with me,” he said. “I saw a lot of gender identity videos … [and] I was like, ‘You know what, maybe I can change my identity, maybe I can transition’ and that was really when I transitioned, during the height of my TikTok addiction.”
“Every time it was just nothing but praise from all these people that have pronouns in their bios,” he said.
“These videos often get hundreds of thousands, if not millions [of views], so it’s really become a problem. TikTok seriously needs to address this,” he said.
London has made similar comments to LifeSiteNews in a January interview with Jonathan Van Maren.
“When you go on TikTok, you see these trends, influencers, these non-binary influencers, now teaching kids about pronouns, teaching kids to transition: ‘It’s easy. It’s fun. If you feel like you’re a boy and you want to wear a skirt, you must be trans, you must transition and have surgery,’” he said. “So social media can be very toxic. And I think it’s very unregulated.”
London is not the only individual to make the connection between social media use and transgenderism.
Helena Kerschner told Michael Knowles in 2022 that self-esteem issues as a teenager drove her online, where she began to learn about transgenderism. Kerschner took hormones at 18 years old, but now at 23 has stopped doing so and is no longer pretending to be a man. She said pressure from groups online led her to mistakenly believe she needed to transition.
“Around the time I was 15 years old, I was going through a period in my life where I just didn’t have a lot of friends, I was having body insecurities that were just really kind of tormenting me, and this led me to go online a lot,” Kerschner said.
This eventually led her to the blog site Tumblr, where she said “gender ideology” is rampant.
“The gender ideology is very prominent there,” she said. She said there are a lot of “social incentives” to change your pronouns and embrace gender ideology to stay in those online communities, as previously reported by LifeSiteNews.
She said those types of “internet communities” can “feel so accepting” and take an unhealthy role in a young girl’s life. “They’re what makes you feel accepted and they’re where you want to fit in, so you’re willing to do almost anything to kind of conform to that social group,” Kerschner said.