technology
The R0 of TikTok
TikTok has spread faster than the coronavirus
From its release in 2016 to its near banning in 2020, TikTok has amassed great and fame and fortune across the globe. TikTok has become such a popular app in a short amount of time because of its use of regular people turning themselves into icons (Charli D’Amelio), the personalized videos in the form of a “ForYou” page that traps people in the app for hours, to its recent popularization due to the oncoming ban from President Trump and his battle with China.
ByteDance’s replacement of Musical.ly has become such a sensation not just because of what’s going on inside the app, but also outside of it. TikTok gained lots of attention when it was getting banned: Did TikTok meme Trump at a rally? Did TikTok share private data with the Chinese government? Whatever the reason, this fear of a ban had TikTokers making TikToks left and right in an effort to prolong the joy before it was taken from them, much like another app that many users sorely missed in 2016 — Vine.
There are many ways TikTok is gaining such popularity. One of its ways comes from its self-made Goddess: Charli D’Amelio.
Charli D’Amelio’s complex dances and quick rise to fame is a mystery not many know. The question is how a city girl from Connecticut goes from being a casual dancer to the most popular social media influencer on TikTok with over 90 MILLION followers!
Well, it’s actually her ordinariness that gives her such fame. She is described as being “relaxed and confident” with her dancing. She dances as if nobody’s watching — only for tens of millions of people to end up seeing it. Only 16, yet she’s already amassed a net worth of $4 MILLION and rising. In December 2020, D’Amelio capitalizing on her fame by releasing a book called Essentially Charli: The Ultimate Guide to Keeping It Real. Whether she has a deep desire to share her life story so far, or she’s a genius worth of Wall Street, this book is certain to only grow her following. And with the more people that watch, like, share, and recreate Charli’s TikTok’s the more fame and wealth the app gets (George, 2020).
Another reason why TikTok is so popular is that it uses the secret technique no human can resist: A ForYou Page.
TikTok’s ForYou page, one of the most controversial and confusing sections of the “TikTok algorithm” leads you to videos that they think you’d like, whether that be people acting dumb, animals acting dumb, people tap-dancing, animals tap-dancing or even just videos tailored to your sport, TikTok somehow knows what you want.
Recently, ByteDance’s algorithm for the page came to light, discussing what appeared to be some sort of information fraud – and considering they are a Chinese based company with a multinational corporation, it’s not hard to see. They revealed what’s really going on when you’re scrolling through the endless ream of videos. There are different “signals” you put off when watching TikToks. Who do you follow after watching a video? How many times do you re-watch a video? Did you share it? Like? Comment? All these questions go into the process of tailoring your videos. It gets even more complex than that. Videos are first shown to a small subset of people, meaning your video might get shown to 1500 people, and if it gets good responses, likes, comments, etc. then you have a higher probability of what’s called “staying on the ForYou page”. It’s easy to see why Trump would call TikTok out for stealing American citizens’ information (Matsakis, 2020).
Trump’s disdain of TikTok brings us to another aspect of TikTok’s recent fame and vast infection of the masses: The Ban.
Trump, in his everlasting grace, made it blatantly clear that he doesn’t trust China, stating that: “For decades, they have ripped off the United States as no one has ever done before,” he said. “China raided our factories, offshored our jobs, gutted our industries, stole our intellectual property, and violated their commitments under the World Trade Organization.” Thus began the government’s process to ban TikTok. The Senate passed a bill barring the app from government-issued phones. Then Trump signed an executive order that would have the app removed from all app store platforms in the U.S. in forty-five days unless TikTok was sold to an American enterprise (Kolhatkar, 2020). While all of this was going, the use of TikTok skyrocketed as people were dancing, pranking, singing, and so on to secure their legacy on the app. Others were content with spending hours on the app watching them. Part of this was due to the pandemic keeping people locked up but by June 2020, TikTok had more than 100 million active users – an eight hundred percent increase since January 2018 – with 50 million of them being daily users. (Sherman, 2020)
Marshall McLuhan's famous quote from his book The Medium is the Massage said that “all media work us over completely.” It means that all forms of media are so prevalent in our lives that they leave no parts of the human race untouched. A social media app made its way from the hands of the people into the ones of government. Now with such movements as Black Lives Matter and the upcoming 2020 election, TikTok has enabled everyone to partake from the comfort of their living room. It has found its way into people's jobs, families, neighborhoods, everything McLuhan said would be affected by technologies rising (McLuhan, 1967).
TikTok is perhaps a bigger disease than COVID-19. So far, the virus has 40.6 million cases worldwide, but that is nothing compared to the whopping 800 MILLION accounts on TikTok, with the app having over 2 BILLION downloads! Now, this number obviously makes sense, as TikTok has been out for four years and no one is really in the mood to catch a deadly virus. But the app is not without its symptoms. Red eyes from staring at a screen to long, loss of a sense of reality, and possible depression from the realization you’ll never have as much clout as Charli D’Amelio, TikTok comes with its own health problems. As long as you have a healthy dosage of reality and social interaction you should be fine, but with the coronavirus keeping us from that, maybe both of these “viruses” will benefit from each other.
TikTok has its own special cocktail recipe for success. From utilizing the skill of an ordinary girl to show that “anyone” can become famous at a young age, to creating a page specifically tailored to your interests, to even going toe to toe with the President of the United States, TikTok has made its way into hundreds of millions of peoples’ phones – and now with Oracle securing the app’s place in America, TikTok is not going anywhere for a long time.
