Devious lick

's front sign after being vandalised by a "devious lick", with the 'L' in "school" having been stolenThe trend originated on September 1, 2021, after the TikTok user jugg4elias posted a video showing a box of disposable masks they claimed to have stolen from school, with the caption "A month into school... devious lick". Similar videos with the term "devious lick" soon flooded the platform, with students stealing items from bathrooms, such as soap and paper towel dispensers, toilet paper roll shields, urinals, sinks, mirrors, and floor and ceiling tiles. Students also allegedly stole items outside of the bathrooms, including exit signs, telephones, interactive whiteboards, and microscopes. The videos were typically accompanied by a sped-up version of Lil B's "Ski Ski BasedGod". The videos' captions often modify the name of the trend with synonymous adjectives, referring to "mischievous" or "diabolical" licks. Various schools began taking action against the trend, warning students of serious consequences and arrests. In British Columbia, students ripped out 42 soap dispensers from school bathrooms within the span of one week. In Huron County, Ontario, a bathroom had all of its urinals and toilets clogged with paper towels, while other toilet paper was ripped out and thrown to the ground. More serious vandalism attributed to the trend involved broken mirrors and light fixtures. In Stafford County, Virginia, a student from Stafford Senior High School was charged for vandalizing a park bathroom near the school. In Mohave County, Arizona, a 15-year-old was arrested for stealing a school toilet paper dispenser. A similar trend emerged in May 2025, which was dubbed the "Chromebook Challenge", this challenge involved mainly vandalism of school-issued Chromebooks by inserting conductive materials such as pencil leads or paper clips into the USB ports, starting fires. ==Reactions==

Platform response The original devious lick video was removed on September 13, and TikTok subsequently began removing videos featuring the trend. It was banned by TikTok on September 15 for violating its community guidelines against illegal activities, by which time the "devious" hashtag had over 235 million views. The hashtag and related search results were redirected to an error message about TikTok's Community Guidelines. Journalist Brock Colyar of Curbed claimed that three separate videos of supposed "devious licks" were, in fact, all staged, with one video of a student supposedly stealing a microscope actually being of a microscope the student owned at home, and critiqued the media and political response as a moral panic. Propaganda use In March 2022, The Washington Post reported that Facebook's owner, Meta Platforms paid Targeted Victory—a consulting firm backed by supporters of the U.S. Republican Party—to coordinate lobbying and media campaigns against TikTok, without disclosing a connection to Meta. Its efforts included recruiting local reporters to publish stories, writing letters to the editor and opinion pieces in the name of concerned parents, and drawing attention to trends such as "devious licks" and "Slap a Teacher". ==See also==