‘The target of cognitive warfare is people; the battlefield is the entire human society,’ stated the CCP military mouthpiece.
A four-hour drive home in November 2020 was harrowing for the Schotts.
They had just learned that their 18-year-old daughter, Annalee, had taken her own life at the family farm in Colorado.
Everything seemed fine when they FaceTimed her that morning to let her know they’d be home from visiting family in Texas at about 11 p.m. Now, they wanted to be with her instantly but still had four hours to go.
“It was the longest, most hellacious drive we’ve ever done,” Lori Schott told The Epoch Times. “It was just like a horrible dream.”
“I was in the car for hours, trying to process this. I remember I told my son: ‘It’s not true. She’s in the barn. She’s with animals. This can’t be true. She couldn’t have done that.’”
For months, Ms. Lori Schott wondered why her daughter chose to end her own life and what she could have done as a mother so things might have turned out differently.
After 1 1/2 years, she finally found the strength to browse Ms. Annalee Schott’s journals. On a page titled “TikTok,” her daughter wrote, “Technically if I kill myself, the problem would be gone.” Ms. Lori Schott believed that the page contained quotes from the app.
A few months later, Ms. Lori Schott hired a company to break into her daughter’s phone.
The mother then found the answer: “I can open her TikTok page, and I would feel the same way.” Even two years after Ms. Annalee Schott’s passing, her TikTok feed was still saturated with depression-related and suicide-suggestive content.
TikTok has specific policies against content that may lead to self-harm or suicide.
But, when one of Annalle’s friends came home from college and visited Ms. Schott in 2022, she revealed to Ms. Schott that both she and Annalee had watched a live-streamed suicide on TikTok. They decided to delete the app afterward, only to download it again about a week later.
By Terri Wu
