Teen girls are in an unprecedented mental health crisis. ER visits for young girls doubled during the pandemic for eating disorders and increased 51% for suicide attempts, according to the CDC. 1 out of 3 teen girls now report being unhappy with the way they look by the time they’re 14! Heavy social media use, especially for girls, is one of the primary drivers of this trend. As the most popular platforms with kids, TikTok must stop exposing children to harmful and manipulative "beauty" filters.

Teen girls are TikTok's largest user demographic, and more than 37 million American kids have TikTok accounts. The platform makes it easy for young users to use filters that drastically change their faces and bodies. These filters create lighter and brighter skin, chiseled jaws, delicate facial features, slimmer body parts, and more. The result is images that are more computer-generated than real, showing kids an impossible versions of themselves with pore less skin, sky-high cheekbones, and emaciated stomachs.

These filters create an impossible standard for children forming opinions of themselves and send kids, mostly girls, an unmistakable message that they are “not enough.” They fuel eating disorders, depression, low self-esteem, and a myriad of other mental health harms. TikTok should immediately disable all filters that create unrealistic beauty expectations on accounts for kids under 18 to support healthy and realistic standards for teen girls.