Tik Tok Takeover
“Tik Tok is the first thing that’s actually made me feel old,” a friend recently said to me, and I couldn’t help but agree. In the two years since its release, Tik Tok has become a viral sensation. It was the third-most downloaded app of 2019, surpassing Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat. Vox called it “the defining social media app of Gen Z.” The app has been downloaded over 1.5 billion times worldwide, and at least 122 million times in the US. Given its rapid rise to fame, many wonder whether Tik Tok will replace other platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. Could a never-ending stream of one-minute video clips become the future of social media?
With the emergence of new apps and technology, social media use has shifted remarkably from one generation to the next. Not only do different generations vary in their usage of social media , but there is also a discrepancy among which platforms they access. For example, 96% of “Baby Boomers,” ages 56 to 74, use Facebook at least once a week, compared to only 36% of Generation Z, those born after 1995. One explanation is the emergence of new platforms that are more accessible to teens. In 2016, Snapchat surpassed Facebook as the most popular social network among US teens and it is predicted to grow among the 12- to 17-year-old demographic while Facebook continues to lose the teenage audience. As one article explains, “When Millennials were teenagers, social media was a place to check out what their friends were up to and update their status, for Gen Z, social media is a place for entertainment.” And if entertainment is what the younger generation is looking for, apps like Snapchat, Instagram, Youtube, and Tik Tok are where to find it.
Could a never-ending stream of one-minute video clips become the future of social media?
Because of this generational shift towards entertainment, it makes perfect sense that Tik Tok has been so successful among Gen Z—teens were their target audience all along. Everything about the platform caters to the entertainment-obsessed generation, intentionally pulling them in and making it easy to spend hours on the app. The home page of the app, “For You,” is an infinite, algorithm-based feed of video clips based on viewing history. This page eliminates the need to follow other people—instead, Tik Tok chooses content for you, and you’ll probably like it. Unlike Facebook and Instagram, and even Vine, on which you selectively follow people, Tik Tok is simple. It asks nothing of the user. In the words of Ankur Thakkar, the former editorial lead at Vine, “Apparently [to get people to engage] you just … show them things, and let a powerful artificial intelligence take notes.” Furthermore, the “For You” page is unlimited. To quote a recent New York Times article, “Stimulation is constant…The pool of content is enormous. Most of it is meaningless.”
But it’s possible that meaningful content, when it is produced, is being hidden from feeds or even deleted.
The concerning truth is that Tik Tok, the social media of the future, has a censoring problem. In September, The Guardian published Tik Tok’s internal company guidelines instructing moderators to “ban videos and topics in line with Chinese-government censorship policies. This censorship is visible— for example, a search for #HongKongProtests on Twitter brings up an endless stream of results, while the same search on Tik Tok has only 9 posts. When called out for this discrepancy, Tik Tok justified the censorship by characterizing Tik Tok as “a place for entertainment, not politics,” and then outright denying that it censors political content. However, there is more evidence to the contrary. When 17-year-old Feroza Aziz posted a clip criticizing China’s persecution of Uygher Muslims in November, the app suspended her account in response. Furthermore, some of the content considered to be a violation of company guidelines is marked as “visible to self,” and limited in feeds but not outright deleted, making it impossible to know what how much content is being censored.
Given Tik Tok’s influence as a growing social media platform, its policy of censorship has concerning ramifications. According to the Washington Post, “app experts believe it could grow into a formidable part of Americans’ online information food chain — much in the same way that Facebook, founded as an app for college students, transformed the arenas of news, politics and misinformation.” Could this app be, as the Washington Post suggests, “one of China’s most effective weapons in the global information war?” It sounds like a bad dystopian novel: an endless stream of videos potentially being censored by the Chinese government and disseminated to young people worldwide. But it’s real, and it’s here. What are we going to do about it?