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We know that TikTok is the world’s most popular social media but the contention is that it has secured an unrivalled grasp on culture with e-commerce, news, politics and even internet search in its sights.
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That it is owned by a Chinese company only adds to the concern in some quarters about what it’s domination truly means.
“There can be no denying that TikTok has become a world-shaping force,” says a Washington Post article that details the extent to which the ByteDance-owned app has taken over the internet.
“In five years, the app, once written off as a silly dance-video fad, has become one of the most prominent, discussed, distrusted, technically sophisticated and geopolitically complicated juggernauts on the internet,” essays Post reporter Drew Harwell.
TikTok’s website was visited last year more often than Google. No app has grown faster past a billion users, and more than 100 million of them are in the US. The average American viewer watches TikTok for 80 minutes a day — more than the time spent on Facebook and Instagram, combined.
Two-thirds of American teens use the app, and 1 in 6 say they watch it “almost constantly,” a Pew Research Center survey in August found. It’s the most widely used app among children according to a Qustodio report. And while half of TikTok’s US audience is younger than 25, the app is winning adult convert too. Industry analyst eMarketer expects its over-65 audience will increase this year by nearly 15 percent.
TikTok’s popularity is largely attributed to its ability “to turn entertainment into an endless game.”
“Every swipe could bring something better, but viewers don’t know when they’ll get it, so they keep swiping in anticipation of something they might never find,” says Harwell. “It’s satisfying enough to keep people interested and so unsatisfying they don’t want to stop.”
Investment analysts at Bernstein Research wrote in an August report. TikTok has replaced “the friction of deciding what to watch,” the researchers said, with a “sensory rush of bite-sized videos … delivering endorphin hit after hit.”
And unlike YouTube and Instagram, where creators are forced to compete with established influencers’ polished productions, even the simplest, silliest or most spontaneous TikToks can become massive hits.
“We’re talking about a platform that’s shaping how a whole generation is learning to perceive the world,” Abbie Richards, a researcher who studies disinformation on TikTok, tells the Post.
That’s a problem if you worry about the real use its Beijing-based tech parent is collecting. As the article explains, the algorithm TikTok employs, gradually builds profiles of users’ tastes not from what they choose but how they behave.
Says Harwell, “While Facebook and other social networks rely on their users to define themselves by typing in their interests or following famous people, TikTok watches and learns, tapping into trends and desires their users might not identify.”
The charge levelled at TikTok bosses is that they work in a country “skilled at using the web to spread propaganda, to surveil the public, gain influence and squash dissent.” That crisis of trust has led to an ongoing debate among US regulators: whether to more closely monitor the app or ban it outright.
The Post reports many users already are self-censoring, adopting a second language of code words — “unalive,” not dead; “procedure,” not abortion — in hopes of dodging the app’s censors and preserving their chances at online fame.
Drew Maxey, a high school literature teacher in St. Louis, tells the paper he worries about how students’ desire for viral attention have already shaped how some of them talk and behave. He’s even started changing his wording, too; on some book videos posted to the site, he won’t even say the word “death,” anxious it might stunt his reach.
“Everything they need, they get from TikTok,” Maxey said. “Yet we’re training a whole generation of people not to say what they actually mean.”
Such concerns are amplified when you consider that TikTokers are increasingly using the app as a visual search tool; 40 percent of Generation Z respondents to a Google survey this year said they had opened TikTok or Instagram, not Google, when searching for nearby lunch spots. (One tweet in June, “I don’t Google anymore I TikTok,” has been ‘liked’ 120,000 times.)
And as Americans’ trust in news organizations has fallen, TikTok’s role as a news source has climbed. One in three TikTok viewers in the United States said they regularly use it to learn about current events, Pew Research Center said last month. In the UK, it’s the fastest-growing news source for adults. The Post’s own TikTok account has more than a million followers.)
After cornering the market on entertainment, TikTok has begun offering its model of behavioral tracking and algorithmic suggestion to advertisers, “promising them a way to know which ads people find most compelling without having to ask,” says Harwell.
Result: The company’s ad revenue tripled in 2022, to $12 billion, according to eMarketer, and is expected to eclipse YouTube at nearly $25 bn by 2025. In the US, the cost to advertisers for TikTok’s premium real estate — the first commercial break a viewer sees in their feed, known as a “TopView” — has jumped to $3 million a day.
Influencers paid to promote goods in their videos now make more ad money on TikTok than Facebook: roughly $750 million, US estimates from Insider Intelligence show.
While TikTok has grown, Facebook has reported losing users for the first time in its 18-year history. In response, Meta has reshaped its own algorithms in its rival’s image not only in developing short-video copycats — Meta’s Reels (also see YouTube’s Shorts) and in “swapping out networks of friends and families for feeds of strangers chasing viral glory,” says Harwell.
“You don’t tell TikTok what you want to see. It tells you. And the internet can’t get enough.”
And all this may only be scratching the surface of TikTok’s potential. According to the Post, it has tested features for interactive minigames and job résumés. It started selling concert tickets. It built a live-streaming business used for meal-cooking showcases, lottery scratch-offs, tarot readings and apartment tours. And it tested a shopping feature that would let viewers buy products from QVC-style live streams in a few quick taps.
All of this power in the hands of a foreign power is spooking US politicians. Top branches of the government and military have banned it from government-issued phones.
“Members of Congress insist it could be a Trojan horse for a secret Chinese propaganda and surveillance machine. Even as the app has transformed into a public square for news and conversation, TikTok’s opaque systems of promotion and suppression fuel worries that China’s aggressive model of internet control could warp what appears there.”
A forthcoming editorial will discuss this supposed Manchurian Candidate, trailed under the banner ‘As Washington wavers, Beijing exerts control.’
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