Teens love TikTok; do they love it too much?
From the perspective of teenagers, TikTok is a major new outlet for self-expression, one proudly home to the silly, the loud and the weird.
To others, the Chinese-owned online video service is an unnerving black box that could be sharing information with the Chinese government, facilitating espionage, or just promoting videos and songs some parents consider lewd. (TikTok denies the first two concerns and says it’s working on the third.)
Welcome to the bifurcated world of TikTok, an emerging social media powerhouse that lets users create and share short videos, many no longer than 15 seconds. “That’s where the GenZ party is,” said Kory Marchisotto, the chief marketer for e.l.f. Cosmetics. “That’s where they’re all hanging out.”
There’s little doubt that TikTok users find it irresistible. But TikTok is also the subject of a U.S. national security review and a Pentagon ban. U.S. lawmakers are worried about national security and censorship risks posed by TikTok’s Chinese ownership.
TikTok draws so much attention because it’s the first Chinaowned social media service to make serious inroads in the West. It’s a smash in the U.S. and other countries, attracting celebrities and companies eager to reach kids and young adults disconnected from traditional media. The NFL has an account. So do Chipotle, Reese Witherspoon and The Washington Post. The U.S. Army previously used it to recruit soldiers.
People have downloaded TikTok 1.65 billion times, the analysis firm Sensor Tower estimated in February. In 2019, it was the second-most downloaded app in the Apple and Google app stores, trailing only WhatsApp. Research firm eMarketer estimates that TikTok roughly doubled its U.S. user base to 37.2 million in 2019.
To many users, what’s special is TikTok’s goofiness and sense of genuine fun. To use it, just download the app and start swiping through videos. You don’t have to friend anyone or search for anything to watch. If you don’t go looking for it, you might not ever come across angry political discussions, much less envy-generating vacation shots from friends. Instead, you
will likely encounter a barrage of funny, meme-y videos from total strangers that TikTok spools up for you, personalizing the feed as you go.
Politics, of course, is still there; so is the social media plague of misinformation. TikTok says it prohibits harmful misinformation.
TikTok makes money from ads, and sometimes the campaigns aren’t readily identifiable as ads.
Some users say TikTok is more authentic than the self-consciously pretty and polished Instagram. Emilie Richer, a 19-year-old from Simcoe, Ontario, says she uses Instagram for “photos that look nice, or the good things I’m doing” and TikTok to “get loose, make jokes, pull pranks and stuff, dress up weird.”
Concerns range from the sexual nature of some videos to censorship by China’s communist government.
TikTok has fleshed out its community guidelines on what’s allowed. It offers a restricted mode for inappropriate content and limited accounts for under-13 users, although it doesn’t verify ages.