Love, Hate or Fear It,
​​TikTok Has Changed America
As lawmakers argue for TikTok to be sold, some of the app’s most popular memes, from skateboarding with a Fleetwood Mac soundtrack to the renegade dance, have been seen tens of millions of times.

Introduction by Sapna Maheshwari

April 19, 2024

Share full article


272
Has there ever been an app more American seeming than TikTok, with its messy democratic creativity, exhibitionism, utter lack of limits and vast variety of hustlers?

And yet, of course, TikTok is not American, which is the whole reason that in March, the House of Representatives passed a bill with broad bipartisan support that would force the Chinese owners of the video-app juggernaut to either sell to a non-Chinese owner or face a ban. Lawmakers say it’s a national security threat, and that the Chinese government could lean on its owner, ByteDance, to obtain sensitive U.S. user data or influence content on the app to serve its interests.

There’s a long road of legislation, deal making and legal challenges ahead before TikTok could be forced to change ownership or even be banned. The Senate would need to pass the legislation — which it may do as soon, now that the House has bundled it into a foreign aid package. It would have to survive lawsuits from TikTok and creators. Buyers would have to clear regulatory approval. And after all that, Beijing could simply block a deal.

But imagining what a United States without TikTok would look like throws into sharp relief just how much the app has worked its way into American culture.

Roughly 170 million Americans use TikTok. That’s half the population of the United States.

TikTok, which officially landed in the United States in 2018, was the most downloaded app in the country, and the world, in 2020, 2021 and 2022. It wasn’t that the elements of it were so new — compelling videos from randos had long been a staple of American pop culture — but TikTok put the pieces together in a new way.

Unlike Instagram, Facebook or Snapchat, TikTok didn’t build itself around social connections. Its goal is pure, uncut entertainment. The algorithm ingested every data point it could from what users skipped, liked or shared — and spat it directly into the maddeningly habit-forming For You Page. Fans whispered reverently that it knew them better than they knew themselves.

Here are 19 ways of understanding how TikTok became part of American life. The music America listens to, the movies it sees, what conspiracies it believes, how it can make or break a product’s success, who it defines as a celebrity — all of it has been influenced by TikTok, for good and bad. Even if you’ve never opened the app, you’ve lived in a culture that exists downstream of what happens there.

Hollywood
News
Conspiracy Theories
Trends
Music
National Security
School
The Other Apps
Your Brain
Fashion
Cooking
Political Campaigns
Shopping
Market Power
Mental Health
Privacy
Advice
Your Bank
Your Screen

ItBecameHollywood’sFavoriteMarketingMachine
By Brooks Barnes

#barbenheimer

#anyonebutyou

Insular, slow-changing Hollywood responded to TikTok’s arrival in 2018 in typical fashion: complete dismissal. We’re way too busy making pictures to worry about some new short-form video app.

Then came denial. (This thing is just another fad.) Next, fear. (Teenagers and young adults are never going to the movies again!)

But there’s a plot twist: Hollywood has come to see TikTok as indispensable.

“Anyone But You,” a Sony romantic comedy starring Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, arrived to a piddly $8 million in ticket sales over Christmas weekend. The movie turned into a full-fledged hit ($219 million) after TikTok users (at the urging of Sony) began making videos of themselves re-enacting the credit sequence.


TikTok also served as a ticket-selling machine for “M3gan,” a Universal-Blumhouse horror movie about a sassy robot that has spawned a new franchise; “Wonka,” which debuted in December and collected $632 million; and the Barbenheimer box office phenomenon, otherwise known as “Barbie,” with $1.4 billion, and “Oppenheimer,” with about $1 billion. Rote glamour shots and insipid interviews — ye olde studio publicity tools — don’t work on TikTok; users want behind-the-scenes “realness.” Hence “Oppenheimer” stars goofing in a hotel hallway before a premiere, and pink-clad “Barbie” stars cavorting on the floor with puppies.

“Now that studios have figured out how to harness TikTok, the last thing they want is for it to go dark,” said Sue Fleishman, a former Universal and Warner Bros. executive who is now a consultant. “That would actually be a big problem.”

It’sGenZ’sWalterCronkite
By Sapna Maheshwari

#disaster

#medialiteracy

#moonlanding

Recently, V Spehar has posted TikTok videos telling viewers what they might have missed from President Biden’s State of the Union address, the first 15 actions that former President Donald J. Trump said he would take if he’s re-elected in November and Caitlin Clark’s WNBA starting salary.

Mx. Spehar posts to more than three million followers from the handle @UnderTheDeskNews and films many clips lying on the floor, a gimmick that began as an effort to differentiate from the authoritative tone of traditional television news anchors. The style of communication has resonated enough to make Mx. Spehar a regular at White House briefings with social media influencers.

News aggregation and analysis accounts like Mx. Spehar’s are shaping the discourse about current events in the United States, especially among young people. They’re a modern version of old-school bloggers — users respond to the personal tone, and the editorializing. (Some creators have even built followings simply by reading print news articles to their followers.)

Pew Research Center has found that about one-third of 18- to 29-year-olds say they get news regularly on the platform, far outpacing people in other age groups.

In 2023, about 14% of American adults said they regularly got news on TikTok, compared with just 3% percent in 2020.

Other sites have similar draws. Roughly 16 percent of all American adults get their news from Instagram, and a similar amount from X. Far more people consume news on Facebook and YouTube.

The appeal of TikTok and other social sites has made mainstream outlets nervous, and has raised some concerns around accuracy and context as original reporting is funneled through other accounts. The Wall Street Journal has more than 340,000 followers on TikTok, while The New York Times has nearly 630,000 — numbers that pale in comparison with the followings of individual commentators like Mx. Spehar.

ItSuperchargesConspiracyTheories
By Tiffany Hsu

#conspiracy

Several dentists recently took to TikTok to debunk a conspiracy theory: that toothpaste tubes were printed with secret codes signaling their true ingredients to powerful people in the know.

Their efforts garnered far fewer views than the video that offered up the theory in early January. Not counting all the times the post was referenced in videos by other TikTok users, it has been seen more than seven million times in less than three months.

Tall tales are common on TikTok, where a flimsy patchwork of assumptions and coincidences — often concerning the schemes of a nefarious echelon of elites — is illustrated by dramatic images generated by artificial intelligence and spooky musical tracks. (Other such hits include false theories that President Joe Biden rigged the Super Bowl in favor of the Kansas City Chiefs or that Justin Bieber had signaled he was a victim of PizzaGate. False allegations of voter fraud also abound.)

Abbie Richards, a misinformation researcher who studies the TikTok ecosystem, said that such posts thrive because of the platform’s potent recommendation algorithms and its low barrier to entry.

TikTok allows users to earn money from their videos through tools such as its creator rewards program and livestream subscriptions. Conspiracy theories, which draw high engagement, are one of the most profitable categories, said Ms. Richards, a senior video producer at the liberal watchdog group Media Matters.

“It’s like candy for your brain — it tells a story that simplifies the world in a way that feels good to you,” she said.

A quarter of American adults who use the app create 98% of its videos.

The toothpaste theory was promoted by two young men known for conspiratorial content, including popular posts about satanic hit men and Britney Spears. They claimed that the colored dots on toothpaste tubes correspond to all-natural, medicinal or chemical ingredients.

The post was quickly reposted, copied and stitched into reaction videos. Some came from dentists, who explained that the dots were actually used during the toothpaste packaging process to help guide manufacturing equipment to properly cut and seal the tubes.

That conspiracy theory is not new — they rarely are on TikTok. Colgate, a major toothpaste manufacturer, addressed the color patch rumor last year and said that “as much as we love cracking secret codes, this one actually has nothing to crack because it’s entirely untrue.”

Even silly rumors, however, can spin out from TikTok into real-world harms. The baseless concerns that store-bought toothpaste tubes might hide toxic ingredients reignited recommendations to opt instead for unproven and potentially damaging homemade options.

ItSpawnedaZillionTrends.Or,atLeast,“Trends”
By Madison Malone Kircher

Including but certainly not limited to: Butter boards, sexy water, blueberry milk nails, unexpected red, lucky girl syndrome, first-time-cool syndrome, bed rotting, 75 soft, 75 cozy, bookshelf wealth, loud budgeting, broccoli freckles, strawberry makeup, glazed donut skin, latte makeup, cowboy copper hair, old money blonde, expensive brunette, orange peel theory, quiet luxury, stealth wealth, tomato girl summer, indie sleaze, coquette, looksmaxxing, male perms, vanilla girl, clean girl, soft girl, coastal grandma, coastal cowgirl, low-high visual weight makeup, sleepy-girl mocktails, fluffy coffee, shrimp tree, girl math, girl dinner, mob wife, clowncore, balletcore, Barbiecore, royalcore, corecore.

ItGotTaylorSwifttoDefyHerLabel
By Ben Sisario

#newmusic

#albumrelease

For the music industry, TikTok has become a potent but unpredictable promotional outlet, and a vital one in the race to mint a new hit. Young artists like Olivia Rodrigo and Lil Nas X saw their popularity explode on the platform, and acts like Fleetwood Mac have seen decades-old songs get a boost from memes on the app.

But TikTok is also the latest tech platform to draw the anger of the music industry for low royalty rates. In February, Universal Music Group, which represents artists like Ms. Rodrigo, Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Drake, withdrew the rights to its music on the app, saying that TikTok was trying to “bully” the company to accept low terms.

Within days, millions of TikTok videos using music from Universal artists went mute, and since then guessing which side would blink first has become a media-business parlor game.

Last week, however, Ms. Swift — who releases her music through Universal, but has owned the copyrights to her work since 2018 — broke ranks and put her songs back on TikTok, just ahead of the release of her next album on Friday. Now the question is, will other artists will follow.

ItMightJustBeaWeapon
By David E. Sanger

For years I thought TikTok was mostly a parenting problem, and had only tangential bearing on what I cover: threats to national security. It took a while — and a lot of conversations with both tech firms and government officials — for me to become concerned about the potential that it could also pose a major problem on that front.

Not because the company’s Chinese owners could figure out your dance-move preferences, but because the algorithm at the core of the app is wrapped in such mystery.

So what’s the issue? The algorithm doesn’t belong to TikTok; it is provided by engineers working for ByteDance, the Chinese company that controls the platform and develops the code in enormous secrecy in laboratories around the world, in Beijing, Singapore and Mountain View, Calif.

No one outside the company knows exactly what goes into those algorithms.

The Chinese government is intent on keeping it that way. It has issued regulations that require Beijing’s regulators to grant permission before any ByteDance algorithms can be licensed to outsiders. They are unlikely to do so.

And so, as long as it is written by ByteDance, and can’t be picked apart on the outside, there will always be the risk that it will become a pipeline for influencing citizens, and thus voters, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

Senator Mark Warner, the chairman of Senate Intelligence Committee, has noted that because TikTok has emerged as a major source of news — and because it collects data on users that the Chinese government could find useful, even crucial — it poses a serious threat, and could become “the most powerful propaganda tool ever.”

Of course, that threat is mostly hypothetical at this point.

At least based on what the United States has made public. The intelligence agencies have been giving closed-door briefings, but presumably there hasn’t been a classified blockbuster, since there would likely be great pressure to declassify it.

Still, we have seen waves of new influence campaigns flowing out of China — much of it aimed at nations other than the United States. While TikTok has not been at the center of those campaigns, clearly, the Chinese have learned a lot in the past few years, including from the Russians. (Researchers have also found that topics commonly suppressed in China, including about the Tibetan and Uyghur populations, appear to be unusually underrepresented on TikTok compared with Instagram.)

This is not a problem that would be solved by simply selling TikTok’s operations to an American buyer. Sure, the bill that went through the House bans a new, Western-owned TikTok from having any “operational relationship” with ByteDance, “including any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm.” Good luck with that — TikTok would no longer be TikTok.

The real question is whether anyone gets to look under the hood. Because to make Americans trust TikTok, the country will need an early warning system, something that will assure everyone that a technology that became popular because it generated memes and celebrates self-expression does not become a conduit for a foreign government interested in subtly influencing how we vote.

ItTurnedtheSchoolBathroomIntoaMovieSet
By Natasha Singer

#toilettoks

#school

#schoolbathroom

Southern Alamance Middle School, a public school in Graham, N.C., recently came up with a novel way to combat student distractions from social media. Or at least to curb the phenomenon that some teachers have dubbed “Toilet TikToks.”

The problem: Educators there noticed a spike in the number of students asking to leave class — sometimes as frequently as nine times per day — to go to the bathroom, where they made TikTok videos.

The solution: Administrators decided to remove the bathroom mirrors that students used to film TikToks and primp for their close-ups. They also introduced an online system that issues students digital hall passes when they want to be excused from class and that allows administrators to track students’ locations. “Since removing the mirrors,” administrators wrote in a message to parents in January, “we have seen a drastic decrease in bathroom visits from students asking to be excused just to make videos.”

Toilettoks — a TikTok genre, dating back at least five years, in which students use school bathrooms as film sets for dance routines, lip-syncing clips or critiques of unclean lavatories — are one of the milder social media annoyances for schools.

Across the United States, students have also used school bathrooms as arenas to stage, film and post videos of bullying, physical assaults on schoolmates and acts of vandalism.

In March, Alamance-Burlington schools announced that it was joining dozens of other U.S. districts that have filed lawsuits accusing social media platforms, including TikTok, of unfairly ensnaring young people.

“We’re seeing the negative impacts of social media on our students every day,” Kristy Davis, the acting superintendent of Alamance-Burlington schools, said. “Their well-being has to be the top priority.”

ItTookOverAlltheOtherApps
By Amanda Hess

My favorite Instagram account is a collection of TikToks. Curated by the videographer Leia Jospé, @favetiktoks420 hunts for Gen-Z’s ickiest thirst traps and bleakest acting exercises and delivers them to me in a Millennial-safe package, uploading them directly to a social network that I actually use.

By the time TikTok debuted, in 2017, I was already in my 30s and too old and lazy to work another app into my rotation. Instagram and Twitter were distracting enough. But now those platforms lie downstream of TikTok’s creative wellspring, waiting for bits of its most popular content to drift into the open internet. TikToks float into my friends’ Instagram stories, percolate into our group chats, swirl into my Twitter feed. My phone is always bleating with its outro sound effect. I rarely open TikTok, but I watch TikToks all the time.

TikToks let loose a chaotic element into Instagram’s internet mall, and they break the monotony of Twitter’s boosted tech-bro threads. They stock YouTube compilations and spark Facebook debates and fuel trend pieces.

If TikTok were to disappear, it would feel, at least for a while, like the internet’s big content spigot had been turned to a trickle. Rival platforms have tried to remake themselves in TikTok’s image — building in short-form videos, algorithmic timelines and searchable sound clips — but have failed to reproduce the hypnotic energy of its perpetual discovery machine. We’d be left with a diluted version of its secret sauce.

But any network that hopes to capitalize on its own popularity will disrupt its product. Even as other social media platforms try to become TikTok, TikTok is trying to become them, lengthening its videos to compete with YouTube and introducing an e-commerce platform to “drive meaningful shopping experiences” and rival Instagram. Eventually some new, inexplicably addictive platform will rise in its place. And I will rely on the kindness of some slightly younger strangers to show me what’s on it.

ItMimicsaFlowState
By Dana G. Smith

#relaxing

#satisfying

#oddlysatisfying

Much has been said about the “addictive design” of TikTok. But what is the social media site actually doing to our brains?

There is very little research looking at what goes on inside people’s heads while they’re using TikTok. But one small study conducted on Chinese university students used magnetic resonance imaging to compare brain activity while they watched personalized TikTok videos (ones the algorithm had selected based on their past use) versus generalized ones (videos the app recommended to new users).

The students had greater activity in several areas of the brain, including ones associated with reward, attention and processing social information, while viewing personalized videos. In other words, the algorithm did its job.

Other social media platforms have been shown to turn on similar brain regions. So what makes TikTok different? Some experts have proposed that it can send users into a “flow state”: the experience of being so absorbed in a task that the person loses track of time. Backing this up, one study found that TikTok users reported experiencing higher levels of flow than Instagram users.

“Flow” is often associated with work or hobbies — activities that are challenging enough to be engaging but not frustrating. Watching videos doesn’t require skill the way that many flow-inducing activities do, yet the app is able to induce the feelings of enjoyment, concentration and time distortion that are characteristic of flow — possibly because of the algorithm’s immersive quality.

ItWonOvertheSnobbiestGatekeeper
By Vanessa Friedman

#metgala

#tiktokfashion

#redcarpet

Is there any more official signal that a business titan has arrived at the heart of the American social-financial-artistic-political power nexus than being invited to be an honorary host of the annual Met Gala, a.k.a. “the party of the year”? Any more glamorous recognition than being asked to join its convener, the Vogue editor, Anna Wintour, in the Metropolitan Museum’s soaring atrium as the great and the good of Hollywood, fashion, sports, Wall Street and Washington swan past?

On May 6, TikTok will be lead sponsor of both the party and the museum fashion exhibition it celebrates. The company’s chief executive, Shou Chew, has been named an honorary chair of this year’s gala, along with the Loewe designer Jonathan Anderson, while Ms. Wintour, Zendaya, Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez and Chris Hemsworth are the event’s co-chairs.

That placement would put TikTok firmly in the tradition of previous gala sponsors like Amazon, Instagram and Apple — tech companies bedazzled by the Old Establishment, which in turn is bedazzled by their blush of upstart cool.

It is an acknowledgment, if any were needed, of the prominent role the app has come to play in fashion in a mere few years.

It was only in 2021, after all, that Ms. Wintour was criticized for inviting TikTok stars such as Addison Rae and Dixie D’Amelio to the party — for somehow cheapening it by catering to the buzzfeed machine of the smartphone, rather than the elite. After all, not just anyone can get an invite, even if they can afford the $50,000 price tag for a seat; Ms. Wintour vets every guest, and the price of admission has to do with cultural currency even more than actual currency.

Which is why, of course, TikTok belongs. Despite the fact that all social media is forbidden inside the party.

Fast-forward three years, and there are more than 75 billion views associated with the #TikTokfashion hashtag; almost 500 million with #2023Gala alone. Luxury brands routinely sign up TikTok stars as brand ambassadors along with every other kind of star, hoping to access their audience (received relevance is something Vogue might be getting out of the association, too). And thus is created a virtuous — or vicious? — cycle in which TikTok feeds the gala machine, which feeds TikTok, which is the vicarious experience that has come to feed us all.

ItLedPeopletoSelf-DiagnoseADHD
By Ellen Barry

#mentalhealth

#adhdcommunity

#psychiatry

TikTok is a mother lode of mental health content, filled with compelling first-person accounts of everything from major depression to selective mutism. Depending on your perspective, that’s either a very good thing — or concerning.

Corey Basch, who analyzed 100 popular TikTok videos with the hashtag #mentalhealth for a 2022 study, emerged concerned about the looping effect of the algorithm.

“What’s so important and disturbing to recognize is the downward spiral that users can get swept into,” said Dr. Basch, a professor of public health at William Paterson University. “If one is drawn to posts related to despair and anxiety, they can easily spend hours exposed to repetitive content known as an echo chamber.”

The surge of content about mental health has meant that young people are more likely to self-diagnose before seeing a clinician, psychiatrists report. Diagnoses for ADHD and anxiety disorders shot up during the pandemic years, especially among young people.

Some researchers have expressed concern about how profit motives may feed into these trends, since platforms often feature advertising from app-based mental health services, and influencers have sponsorship deals with such companies.

“They say we can diagnose you really quick, just take this five-question quiz and we can send you a prescription in a nice little box,” said Holly Avella, a Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University who has researched mental health and social media.

Researchers also warn that TikTok videos can deliver misinformation. A review of literature published last year found that around one-fifth of videos mentioning cognitive behavioral therapy were inaccurate, describing it as ineffective or harmful.

But some users credit the app with breaking open the national conversation around mental illness.

“You can sit there on your pedestal and pooh-pooh it all you want,” said Kate Speer, who has used her social media feeds to describe her experience of serious mental illness. TikTok is helpful for “the very people who are struggling the most, those who don’t have access to services in the real world and who might even be so disabled by mental illness that they are locked in their houses.”

It’stheLatestCampaignTool
By Michael M. Grynbaum

#campaign

President Biden turned down an opportunity to appear on CBS and reach tens of millions of potential voters tuning in for this year’s Super Bowl. Instead, he released his first TikTok.

“Chiefs or Niners?” asked a disembodied, youthful-sounding voice. “Two great quarterbacks; hard to decide,” replied the president, casually dressed in a half-zip sweater and khakis. The caption was “lol hey guys.”

Team Biden, like most other major politicians, had previously resisted joining the app because of security concerns related to its Chinese ownership. (The Donald Trump campaign is not on TikTok, and Mr. Trump has expressed divergent views about the app, proposing a ban during his presidency but recently criticizing an attempt by Congress to curtail its use in the United States.)

Giving in was a nod to the irrefutable importance of TikTok, where about 14 percent of American adults regularly get news, in an election year. There’s now a small studio in the Biden campaign office in Wilmington, Del., where staff members can film “candid” videos with the candidate.

62% of Americans between 18- and 29-years-old use the platform, greater than the share of that age group that voted in the last presidential election.

Campaigns have a rich tradition of adapting to the latest technological fads, from wireless radio to television sets and, more recently, to social platforms like Facebook and Snapchat. Many of these efforts share a how-do-you-do-fellow-kids quality to them, and in an attempt to avoid appearing out of touch, the Biden campaign relies on young, digitally fluent aides to host its TikToks.

It works, sometimes. One video claims to have Trump “caught on camera” making offensive remarks, an attempt to replicate the amateur spontaneity of many TikToks. (In reality, it’s someone’s iPhone aimed at a TV broadcast of a Trump speech.) Other times it comes across try-hard-y, like the video that dismisses a post by Representative Jim Jordan using a popular “I Ain’t Reading All That” online meme.

The @bidenhq account, though, is hovering around 299,000 followers — still small beans in the TikTok world. But in a close race, every lol counts.

It’stheNewMall
By Jordyn Holman

#denimskirt

#springfashion

#goingouttops

Most months, when Kiara Springs posts on her TikTok account about mini skirts or linen tops she finds on Amazon, she earns $10,000 to $12,000 for getting people to buy what she suggests. During her biggest month, Ms. Springs, 25, raked in $50,000 for her posts.

TikTok is now a multibillion-dollar shopping experience — and companies have glommed on. The internet might have killed malls, but now it is one big mall.

Because the bite-size videos are addictive, and partly because advertising on the platform is relatively inexpensive for smaller brands, the app has become a core part of many companies’ marketing plans. Brands say that their videos populated with everyday people can more easily go viral than on, say, Instagram, where they often need to pay expensive influencers. And people who notice shopping-related content spend more time on TikTok, according to eMarketer.

The average user spends nearly an hour — 58 minutes — per day on the platform.

Last year, TikTok debuted a prominent shopping feed on the app that now allows people to buy goods directly from a wide array of vendors. Some fashion and beauty brands think about the TikTok content they could make for a product before developing it.

Fiona Co Chan, a co-founder of Youthforia, a beauty and skin care brand with roughly 190,000 followers on the app, says if she can’t think of 200 TikTok videos that she could make for a product, she’ll likely scrap it entirely.

https://www.nytimes.com/interact ... erican-culture.html