Niccijade Reeves-Alhark
Editor-in-Chief
This September a trend called Devious Lick spread across social media, mainly on the platform of TikTok. The trend, as described by Know Your Meme, is, “ where users film themselves pulling supposedly stolen school supplies out of their backpacks.” Other terms used in this context are, “diabolical lick,” and “godforsaken lick.” Devious licks themselves refer to an object that has been successfully stolen. The things students have allegedly stolen from school range from hand sanitizer dispensers to boilers to smartboards worth an estimated $60,000. People participating in this trend mainly are high school and college students.
The trend started when TikTok user jugg4elias filmed himself pulling a box of masks out of his backpack with the caption "a month into school absolutely devious lick. Should've brought a mask from home." On the week of September 1st, the day he posted it, the video gained approximately 300,000 views. The video is no longer available due to TikTok trying to mitigate the trend and his account has been deleted off of the platform. A few days in, a chain reaction started as the videos of people stealing became more viral. The main kick-offs were a video of someone with a hand sanitizer dispenser, which gained about 7.2 million views in two days, and one of someone pulling out a microscope, which gained around 2.3 million views.
If you did not already know, stealing is a crime. A lot of the videos on the top page of the hashtag, which has been taken down as of now, were the users last. This alludes to the fact that because the user went viral for stealing, they got in trouble with their school and the government. Many students are being suspended and expelled. An example of this is this TikTok, posted by whroo, where he steals a classmate’s shoe while they are in a bathroom stall. The video has the caption, “Last lick of the day till suspended,” with a purple devil emoji. User chiphd1 commented, “i got expelled bro L trend,” and another user said, “This trend literally normalized robbery.”
So far TikTok has made some attempts to stop this trend from spreading to even more people, but as of now, the sounds are still up, linking to the videos of students committing theft. We at the Eagle’s Eye Newspaper do not encourage this illegal behavior and hope that our fellow peers will not do the same.
Image Credit: Niccijade Reeves-Alhark
Comentarios