According to Urban Dictionary, the word "lick" refers to as a successful theft that turns out to be "an acceptable, impressive and rewarding payday."
Eventually, as things got more worse, TikTok began to take action against the trend by removing videos relating to it, which led to the first video being removed on September 13. TikTok then banned the trend on September 15 for violating its community guidelines against illegal activities. At the time of the ban, #devious had amased 235 million views. Related hashtags were redirected to said community guidelines.
Here are some news articles on this trend:
- https://www.nj.com/news/2021/09/what-is-the-devious-lick-tiktok-trend-what-does-it-mean-heres-what-to-know.html
- https://www.insider.com/devious-lick-tiktok-meaning-stealing-school-equipment-meme-2021-9
- https://thetab.com/uk/2021/09/16/devious-lick-tiktok-223041
- https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/florida-teen-arrested-tiktok-school-devious-licks
- https://people.com/human-interest/what-to-know-about-devious-lick-tiktok-challenge/
- https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/18/health/devious-licks-tiktok-challenge-wellness/index.html
- https://eu.cincinnati.com/story/news/crime/2021/09/17/tiktok-devious-licks-trend-arrests-charges-boone-county-school/8364148002/
Besides this, there were other trends on TikTok such as the Milk Crate Challenge (where people try to climb up and down a podium-like set of milk crates without injuring themselves), the Benadryl Challenge (which involves the deliberate consumption, excessive use and overdose of the antihistamine medicine diphenhydramine), the Cha Cha Slide Challenge (where teenagers drive recklessly to the rhythm of a song that was released 20 years ago by DJ Casper), the Skull Breaker Challenge, the Tooth Filing Challenge, the Corn Cob Challenge, the Face Wax Challenge, the Frozen Honey Challenge, the Silhouette Challenge and the "Coronavirus Challenge" (which involves licking stuff). There was even a trend where TikTokers pretended to be the victims of the Holocaust, which is very offensive and insulting to the real victims (and survivors) of the Holocaust. So it is a sad thing that TikTok is literally the mother of all bad viral trends right now.
Here is a New York Post article about those trends (if you want more information about them).
As I said, this thread is a general discussion about questionable trends going viral on TikTok and why people began to despise TikTok due to said trends (besides alleged Chinese government ownership). Even though most of these trends either had ended or were subsequently banned, they were still worth sparking discussion about them.
NSG, what is your opinion on TikTok and the bad trends that went viral there?