TikTok: the most exciting, and controversial, social media app on the planet

Dr. Julie Smith is sitting behind a rainbow of five Post-it notes, each meant to represent one of the “Top Five Signs of High-Functioning Depression.” Said signs will be familiar to anyone who has spent time scrolling through the part of social media devoted to improving one’s mental health: “You do everything the world asks of you, so no one would ever know you feel empty inside,” you don’t find pleasure in the same things anymore, social events are tiring. Perhaps you relate to No. 3: “You find yourself scrolling on social, watching hours of TV, and eating junk food to numb those feelings.”

The British psychologist and author is an inescapable presence on TherapyTok, where psychologists, psychiatrists, and licensed therapists — along with a swarm of “coaches” with varying levels of credibility — make short, digestible videos educating the public about how to decode their own brains. She’s amassed a following of 4.7 million not just by distilling mental health into 60-second spoken-word listicles but by using intensely colorful gimmicks to draw in viewers who might otherwise think they’re about to watch an object being crushed in a satisfying way. Before explaining “3 Ways Past Trauma Can Show Up in Your Present” or “5 Signs of a Highly Sensitive Person,” Dr. Julie will use a visual hook — she’ll pour out a bucket of candy, flip over a giant hourglass, or pose next to a tantalizingly tall stack of dominos (like any skilled content creator, she knows not to give us the final knockdown until at least halfway through) to keep you watching. Does it matter that “high-functioning depression” and “highly sensitive person” aren’t actual diagnoses? Maybe. Or maybe not.

President Joe Biden has signed a bill to ban TikTok, starting a nine-month countdown until the social media app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance will be forced to sell it or have it be removed from US app stores.

The proposed ban has generated furor on Capitol Hill — and online — since it first passed the House as a standalone bill last month.

The Senate is now considering a bipartisan bill that could force a sale of TikTok, with the House having already passed a similar measure and President Joe Biden throwing his support behind it. If the legislation is signed into law — and if it survives likely legal challenges — the question then becomes: Who would buy TikTok?

The bill would require the app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell the social media platform within 165 days of the law going into effect or else the platform will be banned from US app stores.

I keep seeing people asking the internet, “How old do I look?” Each time, I want to tell them, “No, don’t do that, you’re going to get your feelings hurt,” not because people in the comments will be truthful but because they will be mean, on purpose, for sport.

The trend isn’t really about the individual person; it’s a reaction to the larger internet discourse around young people’s fear of aging. Thanks to essentially three viral posts, there now seems to be a culture-wide acceptance of the idea that Gen Z is “aging like milk” (i.e., poorly), beginning with a video last fall by 23-year-old content creator Taylor Donoghue sharing that someone mistook her age for early thirties. A podcast called Staying Up included a small segment about it in January, which went viral, and then significantly more viral when the popular TikToker Jordan Howlett made a response video about his own experience being mistaken for someone significantly older than his 26 years. Combined with the concurrent furor over tween girls asking their parents for anti-aging products and 10-year-olds taking over Sephora, there’s a general sense that kids today are freaking out about wrinkles and retinol way more than anyone else was at their age.

For the past month, TikTok has tried to assure business leaders, influencers, and Jewish organizations that it isn’t promoting anti-Israel or antisemitic speech on its platform. CEO Shou Chew has reportedly met with executives at Tinder, Facebook, and the Anti-Defamation League, among others, to discuss moderation and misinformation, while its head of operations held a private video call with more than a dozen Jewish TikTokers and celebrities, including Sacha Baron Cohen and Amy Schumer, during which Cohen accused the app of “creating the biggest antisemitic movement since the Nazis.”

The meetings came after weeks of accusations by lawmakers that TikTok was pushing pro-Palestine videos into users’ For You pages, quietly indoctrinating America’s young people against the state of Israel. TikTok has denied these claims, writing that the hashtag #standwithisrael had received 46 million views in the US between October 7 and 31, making it one and a half times more popular than the hashtag #standwithpalestine, which received 29 million views. Still, a group of mostly Republican Congress members who have long called for the US to ban TikTok have used the war to re-air their grudges against the app. “TikTok is a tool China uses to spread propaganda to Americans, now it’s being used to downplay Hamas terrorism,” wrote Senator Marco Rubio on X, formerly known as Twitter, in November.

It’s safe to assume that 17-year-old Markell Hughes wasn’t too worried about getting caught for stealing cars last year. After all, he lives in Milwaukee, where just 11 percent of reported car thefts resulted in an arrest in 2021 and only 5 percent were prosecuted. But Hughes appeared in a documentary about the so-called “Kia Boys,” who take advantage of an exploit that makes certain Kia and Hyundai models easy to steal. The Kia Boys often joyride around in the stolen cars, usually driving dangerously and usually filming themselves doing it. The documentary was a hit on YouTube, and shortly after it was posted, someone called a police tip line and gave them Hughes’s name.

Among the evidence against Hughes was a call he placed from jail, where he seemed to brag about how many people saw him driving the stolen car.

You’ve likely heard that the US government is trying to ban TikTok. Lawmakers want to force TikTok to divest from its China-based parent company, ByteDance, and become a fully US-based company; if that doesn’t work (the Chinese government has said it would oppose this), a ban could come in the form of an executive order forbidding business transactions with TikTok, i.e., prohibiting it from the Apple and Android app stores.

The government’s ostensible reasoning for all of this complicated, confusing, and extremely showboat-y hubbub, which included last week’s hearing with TikTok CEO Shou Chew, is national security. A large and bipartisan swath of Congress is concerned that because ByteDance is based in China, the Chinese government could access American users’ data and push or suppress certain kinds of content to Americans. Judging by many of the questions asked by congresspeople (one wondered if TikTok had access to his “home WiFi network”), officials barely seem to grasp what TikTok is, framing it as either single-handedly responsible for all the mischief kids get up to online or as a Chinese psy-op.

“My weekend as a 28-year-old in Chicago” is, I would argue, one of the best TikToks ever created.

It starts like this: A tattooed and mustachioed guy named Mike opens a Guru energy drink and explains that today is “mental awareness” day at his job, so he gets brunch with his friend Lizzie, which includes chicken and waffles and an electric-blue cocktail with cotton candy in it. The rest of his weekend is a similarly expensive caricature of a certain kind of hypersocial, hyper-consumerist urban 20-something: He eats, in one day, (another) cotton candy cocktail, a tower of margaritas with hot wings, small plates at a bougie-looking restaurant called Alpana followed by more small plates at Tanto, popcorn at a rooftop cafe, as well as a slew of increasingly gluttonous and unhinged meals and beverages. Total trips to the Museum of Ice Cream over the course of the weekend: four. Number of margarita towers: six.

TikTokers have always found clever ways around the platform’s notoriously strict content moderation policies. Some of the more delightful examples: referring to sex as “seggs” and lesbians as “le dollar beans.” Porn performers have taken to referring to their work by using the corn emoji, while OnlyFans stars have used “accounting” to describe their job on TikTok. Dacé uses another descriptor: The Modern Working Girl.

Since 2016, Dacé — her stage name — has worked at the Mustang Ranch, Nevada’s first legal brothel. Now she’s demystifying what it means to be a legal sex worker in the US on her TikTok account, which she started in earnest a few months ago and where she’s since racked up more than 75,000 followers. Most of her videos are answers to specific questions from commenters: whether she lives at the ranch when she works there (yes), whether she is allowed to leave (yes, but she has to be checked for STDs before returning to work), how much money she makes (probably more than you do).

When they were 4 years old, Benjamin Burroughs’s kids became obsessed with a YouTube channel called Ryan’s World. The appeal wasn’t all that mysterious: In each Ryan’s World episode, a child (Ryan) would open up a bunch of toys and then play with them, allowing viewers to feel like they were playing alongside him. Their obsession with Ryan’s World went beyond the screen; almost immediately, each of Burroughs’s children asked if they could be a YouTuber, too.

“We said no,” says Burroughs, laughing. He and his wife’s concerns were fairly standard: They felt weird about monetizing their children, they didn’t want to create a digital footprint that couldn’t be erased, and they didn’t want to give mega-corporations like Google or Facebook even more information about their kids. But the experience led Burroughs, a professor of emerging media at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, to begin studying the fascinating, lucrative, and at times ethically questionable world of child influencers.

A man sets his tactical gear bag next to the assault rifle on his bed, above which hangs an American flag. “Don’t mind me,” he says, “I’m just getting ready for my IRS audit.” This, pulled from a viral Twitter thread, was just one of the many TikTok videos that, explicitly or implicitly, threatened civil war after the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. “It’s go time,” he continues. “Everybody knows exactly what I’m talking about.” (He’s talking about fighting IRS employees who are supposedly coming to seize his guns. The IRS is not doing that.)

Most or all of the videos on the thread have since been removed from TikTok, but it’s no accident that this sort of inflammatory political discourse proliferates throughout the platform. In the past four years of its existence in the US, TikTok has become the most effective platform for any single user to communicate to the largest possible audience in the shortest amount of time. And despite the company’s attempts to be viewed as apolitical, it’s now one of the most widely consumed sources of discourse, political and otherwise.

A couple weeks ago, I saw a video of a bunch of matching women in a meticulously organized formation singing Smash Mouth’s “All Star,” except instead of the lyrics to “All Star,” they were singing about the Tri Delta sorority at Baylor University. I am not a student at Baylor University nor have I ever had the patience or the hair extensions for Greek life at a Southern college, but I knew this video was for me because it is the special time of year when seemingly every TikTok user is thrust into the world of sorority recruitment whether they asked to be or not.

In the year since Bama Rush took over the internet last August, it’s become clear that TikTok works on a set calendar, except it’s slightly different from the regular calendar. For instance, there is no “April,” but there is a period of roughly eight weeks in which TikTok decides to serve you videos of beautiful people frolicking in bucolic settings and you consequently start looking up cottage prices on Zillow. Instead of “September,” “October,” or “November,” we have a section of time that can be divided between “Happy Fall” and “Sad Fall,” which are similar aesthetically but have very different emotional tenors.

Welcome to 24 Hours Online, where we ask one extremely internetty person to document a day in their life looking at screens.

People tend to talk about their screen time the way they talk about fast food: Too much is “bad,” a marker of gluttony or laziness or some other moral failing. Ena Da, an actor, comedian, and manager of what I would argue is Instagram’s best meme account, has a more nuanced approach. Despite her self-proclaimed “ungodly” 10-to-12 hours per day online, she argues that the lack of available third places in American society creates a void of shared community and culture that can only be filled by the internet.

It’s a tale as old as time: Bright young things arrive in Los Angeles by the busload, waiting to be discovered by someone powerful enough to — if they’re really, really, lucky! — make them famous.

The 2020s version of this tale reads somewhat differently: Bright young things arrive in Los Angeles having already become famous, wondering what they’re supposed to do next.

Welcome to 24 Hours Online, where we ask one extremely internetty person to document a day in their life looking at screens.

If you’re on a certain corner of Gen Z-leftist-feminist-media-criticism TikTok, you already know Rayne Fisher-Quann, a 20-year-old writer who’s been big on the internet ever since she joined it: As a teenager in Toronto, she grew a sizable Instagram following because her best friend got famous on a Nickelodeon show, and since then she’s built equally formidable audiences on Tumblr, Twitter, and most recently TikTok, where she discusses feminism, leftism, mental illness, and, well, herself.

It is not novel to remark that the experience of scrolling through TikTok feels like emotional whiplash. Upon opening the app you might be greeted with a DIY project from Dollar Tree, followed by a manifesto on the power of friendship as a network for mutual aid. Scroll: a puppy eating peanut butter; scroll: news that a famous cat is dead. On February 24th it took me three swipes to land upon a video purporting to be a livestream of a city in the dark, filmed from an apartment window. Air raid sirens blared in the background, and the only other audible noise was the terrified whimpers of the person holding the camera.

I have no idea whether the footage was filmed by a real person in Ukraine, observing what was happening outside their window in real time, but I am almost certain that the person filming was not the same one who uploaded it to TikTok. Watch it for long enough and you’ll notice it’s a loop on repeat, and if not one of the commenters will point it out to you: “SCAM!” they write in between the thoughts and prayers from other TikTokers. “Staged for money!”

It was early 2019, maybe, when the kids I’d interview who’d gone viral on TikTok started proudly referring to themselves as content creators. My initial reaction was: Why not “comedian” or “competitive dancer” or “aspiring actor”? Didn’t that sound more exciting than two of the most meaningless words in existence: “content” and “creator”? But as talking to kids tends to do, it only revealed that I was washed.

More than 50 million people worldwide now consider themselves creators, a term that encompasses everything from YouTubers to podcasters to writers to artists to people who sell courses online to people aspiring to be any of those things. You have likely heard pundits lament the percentage of teenagers and children who aspire to be influencers and moralize on why that’s a sign of society’s unavoidable doom. I think the more interesting question, though, is when did seemingly everyone in the world become a content creator, whether they signed up for it or not?

“Whether we like it or not, it’s happening,” the woman with the microphone is saying. “I know it feels really fringey right now, but in, like, three minutes we’re going to be living in this world.”

I’m one of about a hundred women in their 20s and early 30s with the kind of professionally cool haircuts you can only get at salons with big Instagram followings, in a dimly lit, rather swanky hotel bar in Manhattan. We are here to learn about the looming future of which our host speaks, the future that is paved with blockchain, NFTs, cryptocurrency, and, maybe, riches. Right now it is dominated almost entirely by men, but, we’re told, it doesn’t have to stay that way.

Here is a list of fashion trends that, according to TikTok, are predicted to become a thing in 2022:

Balletcore, royalcore, regencycore, indie sleaze, 2014 soft grunge, twee, Russian bimbocore, “avant apocalypse” and its cousin dystopiacore, new Space Age, circa-2006 Diesel, balaclavas, clowncore, hyper Gen Z, bellhopcore, skirts over trousers, Missoni-Pucci resurgence, mod revival, “joycraft,” opera gloves, and feathers (just, like, in general).

Monique Black, a 27-year-old fashion influencer from Detroit, likely wouldn’t have a clue how much to charge brands if it weren’t for Twitter. She’d gone viral several times on Instagram and Reels for her fun, trendy, plus-size outfit styling videos and wanted to figure out how to turn her 100,000 TikTok followers into a career while the pandemic stalled her work as an esthetician. She stumbled upon a career mentorship program for women of color, and was later matched with a British talent manager who taught her the unofficial guide to Influencing 101.

For a skyrocketing industry, there are very few places where aspiring content creators can speak publicly about the finer details of their work. It’s a delicate balance, performing your life for the consumption of others, then calculating your value in the public marketplace of attention. While most influencers have multiple streams of revenue — sharing affiliate links, making money from creator funds, launching their own businesses, or starting a subscription service — by far the most popular is brand sponsorships, in which a company pays an influencer to promote or incorporate their product.

What’s worse, ghosting someone you met on a dating app or calling up that guy’s workplace and demanding he be fired for ghosting someone on a dating app? This is a question that nobody in the world should ever have to think about, but is unfortunately the kind of question that we must ask ourselves every time a random person is anointed as the internet’s main character.

What I’m talking about, in this case, is a guy known as “West Elm Caleb,” a 25-year-old who works at West Elm and does not seem like a very fun person to date. On TikTok, multiple women have accused him of ghosting, sending unsolicited photos of his dick, and scheduling several dates in the same day. If you have ever been a single 25-year-old in New York City, this kind of behavior is, while certainly not great, hardly uncommon.

It’s in the third episode of Hype House, the Netflix docuseries released on January 7 about the TikTok content creator mansion of the same name, when it becomes painfully evident that nobody actually really wants to be there. Sure, most of them seem happy to live at the Hype House, currently headquartered in a $5 million home in Moorpark, California, which the collective pays for with sponsorship money from an energy drink brand and a TikTok competitor app. But it’s 2022, and being a member of the Hype House — which two years ago was composed of the Gen Z social media A-list — is now mostly an embarrassment.

To understand what’s going on in this bizarre, entirely-uneventful-but-also-sort-of-fascinating television show, it’s important to know why it exists in the first place. Almost exactly two years ago, a splashy feature in the New York Times introduced the arrival of the Hype House, a collective of mostly white, attractive teenagers who had recently become famous on an app that was only just beginning to be part of the national lexicon. It was part of a wave of Los Angeles social media mansions to pop up in the first half of 2020, all with the same purpose: to use each other’s clout to build more of it. TikTok, at that point, only had a handful of stars to break out beyond the app — the Hype House’s Charli D’Amelio, Addison Rae, and D’Amelio’s boyfriend Chase Hudson among them — but within the app itself, more and more teenagers started growing their audiences to hundreds of thousands, then millions, of followers. And when you get a taste of fame and decide you want more of it, you move to LA.

There’s a thing going around on TikTok right now about “rebranding” one’s self for 2022; in other words, leapfrogging the concept of the New Year’s resolution and transforming into an entirely different person instead. The trend’s participants are almost exclusively young women, as is typical for this sort of aesthetic self-improvement content; they share mood boards of toned stomachs and Chanel logos, Amazon hauls of Olaplex and Crest Whitestrips, tutorials, and list templates that include lines like “listen to inspiring podcasts” and “get a fake tan routine.” They “soft launch” their 2022 selves by waking up at the crack of dawn, doing yoga, taking bubble baths, journaling.

It’s funny, not only because this stuff is so easy to mock (which I will not be doing!) but because it runs so antithetical to the general tenor of the present moment. Growth? Change? Self-improvement? In this economy? Nearly every New Year’s resolution-related commentary I have seen on the internet over the past week has come from a place of either jokey, performative cynicism (those Instagram memes that are like, “Before I agree to 2022 I want to agree to the terms and conditions,” the equivalent of a sassy Etsy mug) or takedowns of the idea that resolutions are worthwhile or even possible at all. “It feels like resolutions aren’t really in vogue anymore,” wrote my coworker Nisha Chittal in her most recent newsletter, and it truly does.

Fifty years from now, when my AI cyborg grandchildren and I gather around the Christmas tree on an 80-degree day in New York City, I hope that I will find some comfort knowing that at least I can say I was there for the sea shanty renaissance of January 9-23, 2021.

What? You don’t remember the span of roughly four days when it felt like the entire internet sang a late 19th-century, New Zealand-linked sailing ballad called “The Wellerman” in perfect unison? You forgot how the whole thing was supposed to be a sign that we, as a species, were longing to come together as one because we couldn’t do so in person? You’re telling me you don’t recite the lyrics in your head as you rock yourself to sleep at night, as though you too are braving the treacherous waters of the South Pacific?

“It just doesn’t sit right with me,” begins a TikTok by a user named Evelyn Juarez. It’s a breakdown of the tragedy at Astroworld, the Travis Scott concert in early November where eight people died and more than 300 were injured. But the video isn’t about what actually happened there. It’s about the supposed satanic symbolism of the set: “They tryna tell us something, we just keep ignoring all the signs,” reads its caption, followed by the hashtags #wakeup, #witchcraft, and #illuminati.

Juarez, a 25-year-old in Dallas, is a typical TikToker, albeit a quite popular one, with 1.4 million followers. Many of her videos reveal an interest in true crime and conspiracy theories — the Gabby Petito case, for instance, or Lil Nas X’s “devil shoes,” or the theory that multiple world governments are hiding information about Antarctica. One of her videos from November suggests that a survey sent to Texas residents about the use of electricity for critical health care could signify that “something is coming and [the state government] knows it.”