I personally believe that this is a great example of a moral panic. There isn't much of a there, there. If you look closely.

For example, let's look at the Tide Pod incident, how many teens in total ate tide pods?

86.

A global moral panic was launched over 86 teenagers doing a very stupid thing as teenagers are wont to do.

> It’s true that since the Tide Pod Challenge began, the American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPC) has received 86 reports of teenagers intentionally ingesting laundry detergent. Yet at the end of last year, the AAPC reported that over 10,500 children under the age of five were exposed to laundry pods in 2017 (for example ingesting, inhaling, or absorbing the detergent). If we are going to have a mass panic about poisonings, ten thousand children are clearly in greater danger than less than a hundred teens. So why was it that only the Tide Pod Challenge that made pearl-clutching headlines across the globe?

https://archive.ph/ACiFD

The actual threat is accidental ingestion or inhalation by little children and elderly adults with dementia. They form the tens of thousands of cases that end up at poison control centres. But there's no moral panic around that, because "Elderly lady with dementia who lives alone accidentally ate a tide pod and then ended up in the ER" is less of a salacious story than "Teen eats tide pod for tiktok challenge"

Let's examine this 'Tourettes-like' story,

> Over the past 2 years, a remarkably high number of young patients have been referred to our specialized Tourette outpatient clinic presenting with symptoms closely resembling the ones Jan Zimmermann shows in his videos

What's a remarkably high number? As far as I can tell, this Op-Ed doesn't specify it. The author has only examined one patient that he classifies with this diagnosis. Ever.

Also interestingly enough, in most of the articles that talk about this subject, guess whose name repeatedly pops up? The same patient named in this Op-Ed.

Jan Zimmerman.

You can see the search for yourself here, https://www.google.com/search?q=Jan+Zimmerman+internet+viral...

We are told that there are "hundreds" of such patients, but we're never given an actual number, citation, or source.

If you try to track the source down, you find pieces like these, here's the "concrete" evidence that's offered,

First the background rate,

> The new surge of referrals consists of adolescent girls with sudden onset of motor and phonic tics of a complex and bizarre nature. In London, UK specialist tic clinics at each of the two children’s hospitals, each centre received four to six referrals per year (out of a total of approximately 200 in 2019/2020), which were acute onset tics in teenage girls

Then the "surge"

> In the last 3 months (end of 2020–January 2021), both centres have been receiving three to four referrals per week of this nature which, if it continues, would amount to 150–200 cases per year and effectively double the referral rate.

4 * 12 = 48. There are two centers so 96.

And this is during the onset of the pandemic, where global quarantines produced a constellation of anxiety in people of all age groups around the world.

This entire moral panic has been driven by referrals, not diagnoses, not confirmations but referrals from primary care physicians during one of the most stressful events of the past few decades (for ordinary people). No evidence has been presented if any or all of these cases are related to social media use or not.

The paper goes into this aspect and theorizes that this is an acute stress response,

> It is hypothesised that this unusual presentation is related to lockdown, change in usual structure and routine, social media related events/bullying and pandemic-related stress in vulnerable adolescents. Stress may be unmasking a tic predisposition in some, while in others compounding existing vulnerability to anxiety, for example, underlying neurodevelopmental or emotional difficulties to the point of becoming overwhelming.

https://adc.bmj.com/content/106/5/420

No specific numbers are provided anywhere w.r.t. how many people were influenced by social media or not, v. how many were patients that were predisposed to such a response that then presented with it in response to a hyper-stressful event.

So no, there is no epidemic of people watching tik toks and running around and changing their gender or becoming tourette-like.

96 possible, undiagnosed referrals does not a pandemic make.

This is just as silly as the moral panic over D&D back in the 80s. It's just updated for modern times.