TikTok (media app)
TikTok is a widely popular social media app that enables users to create and share short-form videos, originally launched in China as Douyin in 2016 before becoming TikTok for international markets in 2017. Owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok initially focused on music-based content, allowing users to lip-sync to popular songs. Over time, it has expanded to include a variety of formats, such as comedy and talent showcases. The app has gained immense popularity, particularly among younger audiences, and has been downloaded millions of times worldwide, surpassing many other social networking platforms.
Users can customize their videos with music and effects, and engage with one another through features like duets and reactions. While TikTok's growth has been meteoric, it has faced scrutiny over issues related to data privacy and censorship, leading to regulatory challenges in various countries, including temporary bans in places like Indonesia and India. Despite these controversies, TikTok has become a cultural phenomenon, contributing to viral trends and launching new social media influencers. As of 2022, it is estimated that TikTok has over a billion active users, and it continues to evolve amid ongoing discussions about its impact on privacy and national security.
On this Page
TikTok (media app)
TikTok is a social media app that allows users to share short-form video content. Owned by Chinese technology company ByteDance, the app was first launched in China under the name Douyin before being released to international markets as TikTok in 2017. The app started out as a music-based app on which users lip-synched to clips of popular songs. It later evolved to include talent- and comedy-based videos. Uploaded videos are typically short in form and initially could only be between three and fifteen seconds in length. The app first enjoyed widespread popularity in Asia but later rapidly gained popularity among Western nations starting in 2018, when it became the most downloaded app in the United States. Despite its popularity, some tech experts worried that the app is a cybersecurity risk for users due to the app’s built in biometrics and location-tracking features. News outlets also called out TikTok for its use of censorship in certain parts of the world.
Background
Prior to the official launch of TikTok in the United States, the app was known by a different name in China, where it was created. The app was first launched as Douyin by the Chinese Internet technology company ByteDance in 2016. Content initially involved users uploading videos of themselves lip syncing to various songs. As the app developed, users also uploaded videos featuring comedic scenes and talent exhibitions. Douyin was extremely popular from the get-go, garnering millions of users within months. Within a year, the app had 100 million users.
After one year of operation, ByteDance decided to take their product to international markets. The app was relaunched as TikTok in September 2017 for countries outside of China, retaining its Douyin moniker within China. It was free to download and quickly became one of the most downloaded apps across the globe. ByteDance acquired a similar short-form social video networking app called Musical.ly in late 2017 and shut down the app’s operation the following year while migrating all of the app’s users over to TikTok. The app was similar to Musical.ly, allowing users to upload very short videos featuring background music tracks. By the end of 2018, TikTok had been downloaded more than 80 million times in the United States alone. On a global level, the app had been downloaded more than 800 million times, and this number did not include Chinese Android phone users. These numbers surpassed download totals for popular social networking sites Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. A number of celebrities also began using the app, including Jimmy Fallon and Tony Hawk.
By the following year, the app had grown so popular that it had become a common household name. The app was available in more than 150 global markets and in more than forty languages. It boasted hundreds of millions of monthly active users around the world, with more than 40 million monthly active users in the United States alone. In September 2019, the NFL announced it had agreed to a partnership with TikTok that included the launch of an official NFL TikTok account that users could access around the world for a variety of NFL content.
Overview
The TikTok app is a mobile app that users download onto their phones. Users create accounts with unique usernames on which they can upload short videos of themselves or other content. This content usually features background music that can be edited within the app. An example of a song edit is adjusting the play speed to either increase or decrease the pace of the song. Users have the option of choosing from a wide selection of inbuilt musical tracks, many of which are popular songs. A common form of TikTok content is a short video of a user lip-syncing to a popular song, often while in the midst of an unrelated activity. Users then add a filter to the video if desired and post the content to their account. Users also post short comedic videos or videos recording a talent or activity.
User accounts can be set to public or private. Public accounts can be viewed by anyone on TikTok. Users also have the option of setting their accounts to private so only those accounts the user has authorized are able to access his or her content. Privacy settings can also be applied to individual posts, with users having the option to make their video public, private, or viewable by friends only. Users can also interact with each other on TikTok. The app has a “react” feature that allows users to film their own reactions to another user’s videos. Users can also perform duets together by using the “duet” feature, which allows users to film one video next to another. TikTok has commenting and messaging features for interacting with users. TikTok also features a user feed called the “for you” page, which recommends videos to users based on videos they have previously watched. The “for you” page has age restrictions, however, and any user under the age of sixteen is not permitted to be featured on the page.
Since its launch, TikTok has become a hugely popular social media app that has shown itself capable of producing viral content. In 2019 a rapper named Lil Nas X posted a video of an original song he wrote called “Old Town Road” that went on to become one of the biggest singles of the year. Media outlets credited TikTok for raising awareness of the song, which went on to receive six Grammy Award nominations in 2020. It also led to the viral popularity of new social media influencers, including Baby Ariel, Michael Le, Addison Rae, Charli and Dixie D'Amelio, and Spencer X.
Despite its success, some tech experts worried that the app could be considered a security risk given its usage of biometrics and location tracking, data that was directly conveyed to the app’s Chinese parent company. The company later became a target of censorship by the Chinese government when users began posting anti-Communist content in the wake of the 2019 Hong Kong protests. Amid growing censorship concerns, the app began reviewing its content-moderation policies. Such concerns led the app to be temporarily banned in Indonesia in July 2018; blocked from internet access in Bangladeshi in November 2018; and preliminarily banned in India in April 2019, followed by a complete ban in June 2020. In August 2020, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that would ban TikTok from the US if ByteDance did not sell the app to a US distributor by September 15. Several critics, however, questioned the legality of the executive order.
On September 13, ByteDance announced that it would not sell TikTok's US operations to Microsoft, which had made an offer to buy the operation the previous month. The same day, it was reported that TikTok had entered a partnership with the US software company Oracle in an attempt to address concerns over data security; however, the company reaffirmed that it would not sell or give the source code of the app to any US buyers. On September 18, it was reported that the Trump administration planned to proceed with a ban on TikTok downloads on September 20 and a complete ban of the app on November 12, 2020. After ByteDance and TikTok filed a complaint against the Trump administration's motives for banning the app in the US on September 19, the administration postponed the initial ban on downloads by a week. It was later blocked by a federal judge and the executive order was revoked by President Joe Biden in June 2021, shortly after a new CEO, Shou Zi Chew, was appointed in May of that year. However, in June 2022, amid ongoing data security concerns, TikTok announced it would move all of its data from US users to servers owned by Oracle.
Despite this controversy, TikTok continued to grow in popularity into the 2020s and remained the world's fastest-growing social media app. By 2022 the app had an estimated one billion active monthly users. While TikTok had long competed with Instagram and other social media platforms, users also began to find new ways to use the app. For example, in July 2022 a senior executive from Google, one of the world's leading search engines, revealed that up to 40 percent of young users, particularly in the Gen Z demographic, had begun using TikTok and other social media platforms as a search engine. This emerging trend helped motivate Google to develop changes to its search engine in an attempt to compete with TikTok.
The US government continued to pay close attention to TikTok through the remainder of 2022 as a result of security concerns related to the app; in particular, some US lawmakers worried that the Chinese government, under the control of the Communist Party of China (CCP), could force the app's parent company to hand over users' data. In December 2022 a law banning the use of TikTok on US government devices passed unanimously in the US Senate.
Calls to ban the app for all Americans continued to gain steam into 2023, amid increasing concerns over national security risks as well as the app's potential to influence US politics. Then, in March 2024 the House passed a bill that would ban TikTok in the US if it did not split from its parent company. The legislation received overwhelming bipartisan support, passing 352 to 65 in the House. Meanwhile, TikTok lobbied its users to call Congress to speak out against the legislation, while members of Senate prepared to vote on the bill.
In March 2024, after a long-running dispute over regulation between TikTok and Universal Music Group (UMG), one of the largest music corporations in the world, UMG removed millions of songs it owned from TikTok. The company faced another new challenge in June 2024 when the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accused TikTok of violating children's privacy rights; this accusation prompted the US Justice Department (DOJ) to plan to file a consumer protection lawsuit against the company.
Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the passage of a bill banning TikTok if its parent company did not divest from its US assets and sell TikTok to a US-based owner, the company continued to mount legal challenges to try and keep its US operations intact. In June 2024 the US Appeals Court for the District of Columbia agreed to hear a challenge to the proposed ban.
Bibliography
Alexander, Julia. “TikTok Surges Past 6M Downloads in the US As Celebrities Join the App.” The Verge,www.theverge.com/2018/11/15/18095446/tiktok-jimmy-fallon-tony-hawk-downloads-revenue. Accessed 6 Jan. 2020.
Delouya, Samantha. “Nearly Half of Gen Z is Using TikTok and Instagram for Search Instead of Google, According to Google's Own Data.” Business Insider, 13 July 2022, www.businessinsider.com/nearly-half-genz-use-tiktok-instagram-over-google-search-2022-7. Accessed 23 Aug. 2022.
Graziani, Thomas. “How Douyin Became China’s Top Short-Video App in 500 Days.” Walk the Chat, walkthechat.com/douyin-became-chinas-top-short-video-app-500-days/. Accessed 6 Jan. 2020.
Hallanan, Lauren. “Is Douyin the Right Social Video Platform for Luxury Brands?” Jing Daily, 11 Mar. 2018, jingdaily.com/douyin-luxury-brands/. Accessed 6 Jan. 2020.
Koble, Nicole. “TikTok is Changing Music as You Know It,” GQ, 28 Oct. 2019, www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/what-is-tiktok. Accessed 6 Jan. 2020.
Leskin, Paige. "Trump's Push to Ban TikTok in the US, Explained in 30 Seconds." Business Insider, 8 Aug. 2020, www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-tiktok-ban-us-china-explained-in-30-seconds-2020-8. Accessed 13 Aug. 2020.
Lima-Strong Cristiano, et al. "House Passes TikTok Bill That Could Ban App in the U.S., Spawning Senate Support." The Washington Post, 13 Mar. 2024, www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/13/tiktok-ban-passes-house-vote/. Accessed 15 Mar. 2024.
Perez, Sarah. “The NFL Joins Tiktok in Multi-Year Partnership.” TechCrunch, 3 Sept. 2019, techcrunch.com/2019/09/03/the-nfl-joins-tiktok-in-multi-year-partnership/. Accessed 6 Jan. 2020.
Perez, Sarah. “TikTok Surpassed Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat & Youtube In Downloads Last Month.” TechCrunch, 2 Nov. 2018, techcrunch.com/2018/11/02/tiktok-surpassed-facebook-instagram-snapchat-youtube-in-downloads-last-month/. Accessed 6 Jan. 2020.
Rayome, Alison DeNisco. “10 Most-Downloaded Apps of the 2010s: Facebook Dominates the Decade.” CNET, 16 Dec. 2019, www.cnet.com/news/10-most-downloaded-apps-of-the-decade-facebook-dominated-2010-2019/. Accessed 6 Jan. 2020.
Revell, Eric. "Federal Lawsuit against TikTok to Focus on Children's Privacy: Report." Fox Business, 23 Jun. 2024, www.foxbusiness.com/technology/federal-lawsuit-against-tiktok-focus-childrens-privacy-report. Accessed 25 Jun. 2024.
Spangler, Todd. “Musical.ly Is Going Away: Users to Be Shifted to Bytedance’s TikTok Video App.” Variety, 2 Aug. 2018, variety.com/2018/digital/news/musically-shutdown-tiktok-bytedance-1202893205/. Accessed 6 Jan. 2020.
Shepardson, David. "Appeals Court to Hear Challenges to Potential US TikTok Ban on Sept. 16." Reuters, 17 Jun. 2024, www.reuters.com/legal/appeals-court-hear-challenges-potential-us-tiktok-ban-sept-16-2024-06-17/. Accessed 26 Jun. 2024.
Yurieff, Kaya. “Tiktok Is the Latest Social Network Sensation.” CNN, 21 Nov. 2018, edition.cnn.com/2018/11/21/tech/tiktok-app/index.html. Accessed 6 Jan. 2020.
Watson, Kathryn. “Senate Approves Measure to Ban TikTok from Government Devices.” CBS News, 15 Dec. 2022, www.cbsnews.com/news/senate-tiktok-ban-us-government-devices/. Accessed 12 Jan. 2023.
“8 Lessons from the Rise of Douyin (Tik Tok).” Technode, 15 June 2018, technode.com/2018/06/15/8-lessons-douyin/. Accessed 6 Jan. 2020.