Task 2 – Gavin Pierce

Devious Lick was a well-known trend on TikTok in 2021, during the COVID era of school, which was known for being extremely destructive to public and private property. Essentially, the TikTok trend first became viral when a user posted about stealing masks, which at the time was becoming harder and harder to come by, from the school. This post started a sinister in-nature trend, which aimed to cause as much harm as possible. Popular examples of the trend involved bathrooms, most often depicting ripping the toilet paper or paper towel dispensers off the walls. The worst of which were typically ripping or destroying the sinks and toilets out of the wall. It wasn’t just limited to the bathrooms, though eventually making its way to the classroom, this caused teachers to have their personal items stolen. Not only did this trend terrorize the public school system, which was having to deal with repairing the school on already low budgets. But it also caused teachers to have to pay out of their own pockets for their destroyed items.

The results of this trend caused many restrictions in high schools across the country, whether or not the students at their school were participating in said trend. From my own experience and others, teachers had become so distrustful of students that they were not permitted to be alone in rooms without documentation, whether it was the bathroom or a classroom. This caused students to be treated as if they were actively committing the crimes. Some students who posted videos to this trend would be found by their schools, resulting in long-term suspension or expulsion from the school, even in some cases legal consequences. Overall, this trend resulted in seeing how far people were willing to go for five seconds of fame and made the schools that already had strict guidelines even more strict.

As a reaction to the Devious Lick trend, there would be posts about the opposite where people would do actions that would be seen as charity to the people that have been affected. These would range from installing new appliances overnight at the school or leaving gifts for their teachers who have been hurt by it. This trend would have a positive impact on the scars that were left by the trend. For this trend to go viral it would have to be whilst the Devious Lick trend is still going as it would be a clear opposite side of the coin from it that many might find funny and heartwarming to see. Just like spin-offs of TV shows the new trend would only last about a week before the majority of people stop finding it funny and begin to think it is corny causing it to lose its popularity. This is a common trend amongst different social media apps as negative trends are more rewarded by algorithms than positive trends.