TikTok, a social media platform targeted at young mobile phone users, was the second-most downloaded app in the world in 2019. It was the most downloaded app in July 2020.
It’s also become a geopolitical football. Owned by Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok has been banned by India along with 58 other Chinese-owned apps in July in response to escalating border tensions between the two countries. The Trump administration issued an executive order banning TikTok and Chinese-owned messaging platform WeChat from engaging in transactions in the United States beginning on September 15. The company sued the Trump administration in August in response to the ban.
As a political scientist who studies social media, I’ve looked at what makes TikTok unique and why young people have flocked to it. In short, the phone-only app lets users record themselves dancing or goofing around to a music or spoken-word clip and then alter the videos using a wide array of effects. Despite its superficially frivolous nature, young people have been using the platform to send political messages, coordinate political actions, and hang out in an online space largely free of adults.
How it works
Each tiktok is a three- to 60-second-long video that loops when finished. The majority of the screen is taken up by the video uploaded by the user. The app offers a wide range of options for customizing and combining these videos, including video taken with the user’s smartphone, photos uploaded from the web, emojis and other text superimposed on the video, and special effects. The app’s library of filters and video-distorting effects is like Instagram filters but for video.
The bottom of the screen contains information about the “sound”: the audio file that accompanies the video. These “sounds” can either be user-uploaded or chosen from a library of popular sounds. This library contains both snippets of songs by professional musicians and silly recordings of people talking. “Sounds” have had a huge impact on the music industry: “Old Town Road,” one of the most popular songs of all time, first gained popularity as a TikTok “sound” with an associated dance.
When you open the app, you encounter a tiktok that starts playing. This is the “For You Page,” which plays tiktoks that TikTok’s algorithm recommends for you. To go to the next tiktok, you swipe up. To see the account that uploaded the current tiktok, swipe right.
How it compares
Comparing TikTok with other digital media platforms shows what makes it unique. Like YouTube, TikTok consists entirely of videos. Like Facebook and Twitter the primary mode of consuming tiktoks is by navigating through a “feed” of short, digestible posts.
