Are ghosts haunting TikTok users? Viral trend sparks concern

Ghosts are taking over TikTok and parents are being warned that a spooky new trend is terrifying to young children.

TikTok has seen its fair share of scary trends over the years, most recently with the horrifying zombie trend that infected China.

Now, ghosts have stepped, or floated rather, onto the plate to deliver their own frightening experience in the form of a new filter that has the internet talking for all the wrong reasons.

In the trend, parents let their child use their phones with a ‘ghost filter’ enabled. Soon after, a spooky poltergeist pops on the screen and begins making creepy noises. The results have seen kids run for their lives after coming face-to-face with the ghoul.

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TikTok ‘ghost filter’ terrifies users

In one video, a parent left their kid in the room with the filter enabled only for the child to scream and try to open the door, afraid that they would be eaten by the creature.

In another, a couple of kids try to run away from the ghost, but freak out when the door won’t open.

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Others feature much younger children, sometimes too small to make sense of what is happening on screen.

The filter has even resulted in Northern Ireland politician Jason Barr trying to get the filter banned from the site. It seems like the GhostBusters weren’t available, though, because he went straight to TikTok itself.

“Some people see this as funny but I can assure you it’s not funny when you have a child running out of a room screaming after seeing something like this,” he said to Belfast Live.

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“Some children have been left petrified by this filter and that’s why I’ve got in touch with the platform about getting it removed… I find it really alarming that people would scare children in this way and leave them screaming in a locked room. This can have lasting effects on them.”

TikTok isn’t bending the knee, however. The company says it will be removing content that violates its guidelines, but it’s still monitoring videos posted with the “ghostfilter” hashtag.