government and military have banned it from government-issued phones. Former president Donald Trump tried to dismantle it. TikTok’s model could soon shape the entire internet.īut TikTok’s ownership, by the Beijing-based tech giant ByteDance, has also made it one of the biggest pariahs in Washington. Books from the author Colleen Hoover, BookTok’s biggest star, have sold more copies this year than the Bible, according to data from NPD BookScan, which tracks sales at 16,000 stores nationwide.Īmerica’s biggest technology innovators are reinventing themselves in TikTok’s image, not only in developing short-video copycats - Meta’s Reels, YouTube’s Shorts - but in swapping out networks of friends and families for feeds of strangers chasing viral glory. Viral videos of people delighting in their favorite books, many of them with the hashtag #BookTok, which has 78 billion views, helped make 2021 one of the publishing industry’s best sales years ever. TikTok’s cultural influence on a new generation of media has led to some astounding ripple effects. One in three TikTok viewers in the United States regularly use it as a source of news. The Washington Post’s TikTok account has more than a million followers. (AARP last year even unveiled a how-to guide.) audience is younger than 25, the app is winning grown-ups’ attention, too the industry analyst eMarketer expects its over-65 audience will increase this year by nearly 15 percent. A report this summer by the parental-control tool Qustodio found that TikTok was both the most-used social media app for children and the one parents were most likely to block. Two-thirds of American teens use the app, and 1 in 6 say they watch it “almost constantly,” a Pew Research Center survey in August found usage of Facebook among the same group has been cut in half since 2015. The average American viewer watches TikTok for 80 minutes a day - more than the time spent on Facebook and Instagram, combined. No app has grown faster past a billion users, and more than 100 million of them are in the United States, roughly a third of the country. TikTok’s website was visited last year more often than Google. Its dominance, as estimated by the internet firms Cloudflare, Data.ai and Sensor Tower, is hard to overstate. Part 3: As Washington wavers, Beijing exerts control. The web’s most popular app has reshaped American culture, hypnotized the world and sparked a battle between two global superpowers.
In five years, the app, once written off as a silly dance-video fad, has become one of the most prominent, discussed, distrusted, technically sophisticated and geopolitically complicated juggernauts on the internet - a phenomenon that has secured an unrivaled grasp on culture and everyday life and intensified the conflict between the world’s biggest superpowers.
If you have not used TikTok, you are rapidly becoming the global exception. “It will suck you in for hours,” she said. Yet still, in her off hours, she does what all her friends do: watches TikTok. Many days, she feels drained - by the endless scramble for new content by the weird mysteries of TikTok’s algorithm by the stalkers, harassers and trolls.
Now 25, she spends her days making TikTok videos from her apartment in Los Angeles, negotiating advertising deals and always chasing the next big hit.
Shelby Renae, a former pizza-shop worker, posts TikTok videos of herself playing the video game “Fortnite.” She has 1.3 million followers and her videos have been liked 37 million times.
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