TikTok perfectly encapsulates the zeitgeist of 2020. The video-sharing social network from Beijing-based ByteDance is the perfected form of previous social media trends: Vine’s snappiness, Instagram’s infinite scroll, and Reddit’s niche subsets. Now that quarantine has locked us away with phones as our constant companions, we suddenly have extra free hours that TikTok, like a gas, has expanded to fill. Since the start of 2020, Tiktok has surged in popularity, receiving 52.2 million unique American users, 12 million from March alone. It now sits as the most downloaded app in the world at more than 2 billion downloads.
TikTok’s growth points to a new form of digital identity that is both personal and public: a new norm for the 2020s that has evolved over the past few years. Thanks to the app’s video-editing capabilities, the skill needed to make a TikTok is less than on other platforms, lending TikToks a homemade air. But the massive audience that TikTok videos can reach presents these casual clips to a very public eye. All kinds of content exist on the app; still, the carefully-curated “For You” page that greets every user ensures a finely tailored experience from the vast chaos. And, though the platform has been dismissed as a time-waster for teens, it has successfully capitalized on broader trends in how we consume social media and grown into a new behemoth for the decade. Though TikTok trends themselves tend to be short-lived, the app’s duality may be the key to its longevity.
The Homemade Film Festival
TikTok’s user base skews young. Reuters reported in 2019 that about 60%of the platform’s users in the U.S. are between the ages of 16 and 24. TikTok shares similarities with other apps targeted toward a young user base, like Snapchat, which is used by 69%t of U.S. teens. Both Snapchat and TikTok have a more informal culture, where the self-consciousness of more public social media platforms, like Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, is nowhere to be found. While platforms like Facebook – which 7 in 10 U.S. adults use – see a broader range of ages among their users, TikTok is undeniably one for the first generation of true digital natives who have grown up alongside social media.
After tiring of the perfect presence one is pressured to curate on Instagram – and the insecurities the platform tends to exacerbate – it seemed only natural that apps, where imperfection and casual communication reigned, would gain traction. TikTok’s popularity points to a reaction to that image-consciousness, according to Karen North, a professor of communication at the University of Southern California specializing in social media and psychology. “TikTok made everything extremely easy and really fun,” North told the HPR. “The whole culture of it is not to judge.” For the uninitiated, TikTok is best known for its viral dance challenges, which users of all skill levels can participate in. “It doesn’t matter if you do it well or exceedingly poorly,” North said, adding that TikTok’s algorithm and huge audience make it possible for anyone who participates in a challenge to get lots of views.
Beyond viral challenges that make it easy and appealing to jump in, TikTok also makes it easy for users to edit their own videos through the app. This, coupled with the overall flexibility for format on the platform, has brewed a perfect environment for encouraging users to experiment with their videos, which range from personal stories to comedy sketches to tutorials. And with stay-at-home advisories encouraging everyone to keep indoors, people have more free time to spend on their phones. The extra time has invited even adults and college students to join the TikTok craze, and with more users comes more content.
“It’s like a bunch of sixth graders hosted a film festival and didn’t give you a program beforehand,” said Eli Russell ’20, who started making TikTok videos (@notchrissyteigen) after returning home in March when students left campus because of concerns about the coronavirus. Russell said that a combination of more time, more of his friends getting on the app, and the convenience of making videos on TikTok all factored into his start on the platform. Tyler Sanok ’22 (@ksanok10) also cited extra time and the platform’s convenience as the reasons he and his brother started posting TikTok videos during quarantine. Because the amount of time and effort needed to make a TikTok video isn’t as much as that required for, say, a YouTube video, he said, “there’s no consequence for not shooting your shot.”
It is also not surprising that for Generation Z users – who grew up in the era of internet stardom, thanks to YouTube – the prospect of TikTok celebrity is also an appealing motivator to produce videos. TikTok’s most popular creator, 16-year-old Charli D’Amelio, gained more than 66 million followers in the span of a year, mainly for her dance videos and relatability, despite being an ordinary person without a large internet following before her start on the platform. Through some combination of luck, timing, and the omnipotent TikTok algorithm, TikTok fame could be within reach for any user.
The Algorithm
On any platform made for sharing content, there is potential for spreading messages. TikToks are punchy and to-the-point due to an upper time limit of 60 seconds. Its estimated audience of 800 million active users provides enormous potential for content of any agenda to go viral. In recent weeks, TikTok has been increasingly used for political organizing and educational efforts, though those efforts still stick to the pace of the app’s other snappy videos. “When you use any platform [for promoting causes] it’s important to do it so that it fits the culture of that platform,” North said. TikTok videos often have background music or are filmed casually with a single person speaking directly to a camera. A scroll through the array of videos tagged with “police brutality” shows that many of these videos still maintain the same format.
Claira Janover ’21 (@cjanover) said that when she first started making TikTok videos during quarantine, her videos focused more on humor. Since then, her channel has started to tackle topics like racism, sexism, and police brutality – a gradual change prompted by comments she’s received on her TikToks and her own changing focus. “If I believe something, I’m going to articulate it,” Janover said. She added that she thought TikTok lends itself well to sharing information of substance because “it adheres to the narrowing American attention span, but also has the power to influence.”
Still, though, TikTok’s algorithm prevents it from being a completely effective means of communicating information to diverse audiences. TikTok’s impeccably-curated “For You” page – an infinite scroll of videos – presents each user with a feedback loop based on the content they have interacted positively with in the past. Sanok said that while it is beneficial for TikTok’s algorithm to help videos gain traction by presenting them to users with similar interests as the creator, when it comes to sharing political ideas in a productive way, the resulting echo chamber may fall flat. “The people seeing this are not the people that you need to change their minds. You need to send it off to the people who don’t necessarily agree with this or are not informed,” he said.
Because of this, despite how quickly users can share content on TikTok, it is difficult to tell how broadly any given video spreads. “It’s not like Twitter, where you know what’s trending globally,” Russell said. “It’s a very tailored experience.” He added that this aspect makes it difficult to make generalizations about the platform. Since every individual’s experience is engineered to be specific to their interests, everyone is likely to find their niche, but breaking out of that niche requires actively searching for different content so that the algorithm can adjust. “I think if I spent one day liking random dancing videos, then tomorrow, I wouldn’t have any activist videos. I would just have those dance videos,” Russell said.
Still, though, videos can make it outside of circles of like-minded users. “Going into more of a political atmosphere of content, there’s obviously a lot of conservative and a lot of libertarian pushback,” Janover explained. She added that other TikTokers have put in the effort to make videos rebutting her videos, with some of those rebuttal videos receiving the same amount of attention as the original video – evidence that TikTok has a pocket of like-minded users for nearly every possible perspective.
In July, one of Janover’s videos went viral after conservative commentators shared it, sparking a wave of backlash that she said targeted not only her but also friends and supporters. In the satirical TikTok, Janover likened saying “All Lives Matter” in response to “Black Lives Matter” to claiming that a papercut matters just as much as a stab wound. Janover subsequently received death threats and lost an internship at Deloitte. Janover did not anticipate the video receiving so much attention. “I posted that video almost a month ago. It’s not new,” Janover told the HPR. She added that she had seen progressive activist TikToks use extreme analogies before, and did not think her video was extraordinary.
“It would be one thing to have had a conservative say, like, ‘This type of demeanor isn’t respected. This anger, this displacement – even if it is an analogy – is not appropriate or professional.’ I would have been able to see the validity in that,” Janover explained, adding that it surprises her that so many people interpreted the TikTok video as a serious threat. But people of all political stances and age groups are paying attention to TikTokers, it seems. “The fact that I even say, ‘Oh, my TikTok is what caused this’ is very odd for me to think about,” Janover said.
TikTok’s Future
TikTok’s short-lived predecessor, Vine, graced the Internet with its presence for just four years. Vine’s demise is primarily credited to rival apps adding improved versions of its features and an inability to adapt quickly enough to keep its users. TikTok, however, has steadily grown since its initial 2016 launch in China by demonstrating deft adaptability. When allegations that TikTok was censoring the Black Lives Matter movement tag drew attention, TikTok responded just days later with an apology, creation of a diversity council, and commitment to donating $3 million to nonprofits that help the Black communities hard-hit by COVID-19 as well as an additional $1 million toward fighting racial injustice in the U.S. The speed of the move demonstrated a close attunement to TikTok’s user base, which could protect TikTok from potentially being blindsided if any strong challengers to the video-streaming app market ever arise.
TikTok’s popularity in the U.S. comes amid deepening political partisanship. The video streaming app is not the only social media platform to use confirmation bias as a tactic to hook users on its content. However, the fact that doing so has only boosted TikTok’s popularity signals that perpetuating confirmation bias is profitable. Therefore, there is little incentive for social media platforms to move away from using confirmation bias. This tactic is especially troubling given that social media now outpaces newspapers as a go-to news source for Americans, according to the Pew Research Center. Social media incentivized in this way for functioning as an echo chamber will only further entrench polarization.
There is also, of course, the matter of privacy and security concerns. ByteDance, as a Chinese company, is subject not to privacy laws in the United States, but those in China. TikTok has faced several controversies over security in recent months. Most recently, the app came under scrutiny for reading text left on users’ pasteboards whenever TikTok was opened. It is no surprise that the app collects more information than users might anticipate; thousands of apps have been found to do so, either directly or by piggybacking on permissions given to other apps. But TikTok’s concerns over data privacy will likely persist in the public consciousness for years to come, as lawmakers struggle to keep pace with technological advancements.
Still, TikTok appears to have solidified its place among the most-used social media platforms and seems to be here to stay for better or worse. Its blend of private and public reflects a continuing trend of blending our personal and digital lives. Furthermore, the fact that, despite a history of security scandals, so many people continue to use TikTok, calls into question how much digital privacy invasion we are willing to tolerate from tech companies. And, despite the massive amount of content available on the app, the fact that users can find themselves in smaller echo chambers points to a growing trend of polarization; TikTok’s success only shows other tech companies that vindicating users by showing them personalized content will be rewarded. TikTok is fun, but the fun veneers deeper considerations we’ll have to make as we accept that blend of public and private as fixtures in our daily lives. We will need to examine whether we want the perfected convenience of algorithmically-curated content, or whether it’s possible to reward breaking out of our bubbles.
Image Credit: The image by Kon Karampelas is licensed under the Pixabay License.