What’s in a TikTok?
Social media is meant to be a reasonably predictable place. You have the old behemoth in Facebook whose star is slowly waning. Instagram is where Gen Z has made their abode. Snapchat is for those who want a little extra in their social lives. Twitter is for stressed, unpaid interns as they sleuth government pages for the next scoop. And then you have the supposedly no-nonsense LinkedIn that actually veers too frequently into the absurd as professional development and networking take a backseat to one-upmanship and self-promotion.
Enter Tiktok. TikTok came and rocked the boat of social media hard. Many things aligned for TikTok to become the social media application that captivated a generation. It built on the experiences of older apps like Vine and Dubsmash and centered entertainment solely on short videos. Initially no content on TikTok could be longer than a minute. And people liked that. TikTok also lowered the technical barriers that prevented one from becoming a vlogger on YouTube or an Instagram influencer. Low-effort content is the mainstay on TikTok with the inbuilt editing in the app making content creation easy and convenient. It also has a formidable algorithm running the software that gathers data on what a user likes and then feeds them more of the same with increasing precision in an endless loop. Many claim, and not with some insolence, that TikTok is popular because people have shortening attention spans and simply cannot tolerate a 7-minute YouTube vlog.
So why is it that TikTok finds itself at the heart of one storm after the next? Why didn't it become the next darling of Wall Street in the footsteps of similar innovators with mass appeal like Tesla and Netflix?
Lots of reasons can be attributed to why TikTok attracts controversy. One problem that has persisted for TikTok is its ownership by Chinese company ByteDance. Companies in China may be asked to share their data with the Chinese government. This could be seen as a significant privacy issue as it could mean user data of customers in other countries is accessible to the Chinese government. TikTok was almost expelled from the US under the Trump administration before it reached an agreement with American firm Oracle to store data of US customers within mainland US. Even when data-sharing is not the main issue, TikTok's association with China also creates problems when there is geopolitical activity. For example, when China and India were engaged in a border dispute in 2020, India responded by banning many Chinese software apps in a gesture of nationalism and TikTok has since been absent in India.
In addition to this, TikTok has also been in deep waters due to its policies on censorship on the platform. The content on the platform is exclusively user-generated and content only becomes viral if users engage with it extensively. In this way, TikTok is an inherently democratic app, but this has not stopped governments from confronting TikTok when the truth it tells is different from a state's self-constructed narrative. This is evident in Pakistan, where TikTok has been periodically banned multiple times for promoting "immoral" content. As a result, TikTok has now deployed an army of moderators that censors content to comply with government orders.
Another reason TikTok faces the ire of the powers-that-be is that some claim the nature of short, frenzied content that is at the heart of the platform is unhealthy and unproductive. Recently a TikToker faced serious criticism in Pakistan when she posed and strutted in front of a burning forest fire, seeming to promote casualness and ignorance of environmental issues. Similarly, in another instance, a youth was killed when hit by a moving train that he was trying to pose next to. In such instances, it is important not to shoot the messenger and accuse TikTok of all ills with a society. Considering that this is the sort of content that people find entertaining, these trends point to deeper problems in our world beyond TikTok.
Through hell and high water, TikTok has persevered. It now faces fresh competition with other platforms launching their own short video apps. Now one can choose between Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, or the plethora of TikTok clones like Snack Video. Still, TikTok remains one of the fastest-growing social media apps in the world, and if its past perseverance is indicative of what is to come, it seems TikTok is here to stay.
