You’ve seen the ads featuring a 17-year-old teenager with neon contact lenses, bleached hair and fake blood dripping down her neck, lip-syncing to a tune. Why on earth would you download it just to see people dress up, say words and circle to soundbites? We get it. However, over a billion people reportedly scroll through TikTok monthly and spend almost an hour on it every day
TikTok is a social app for creating and sharing videos.
Many videos tend to focus on music, with the creators taking advantage of the app’s extensive catalog of sound effects, music snippets, and filters to capture brief clips of them dancing and lip-synching. But there are countless videos with different topics to discover. There are DIY and craft videos, comedic sketches, whatever. If TikTok sounds familiar, that’s because it had similar apps like Vine and Dubsmash.
TikTok also had a predecessor called Musical.ly, which Chinese entrepreneurs Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang launched in 2014. ByteDance acquired Musical.ly in 2017 and a year later it incorporated the service’s core functionality and user base into its own TikTok app. Existing Musical.ly users have been migrated. By 2018, TikTok had overtaken Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat in monthly installs in US app stores.
TikTok has over a billion monthly active users worldwide – 63 percent of whom are between 10 and 29 years old. In the US, too, women outnumber men two to one on TikTok. Due to the popularity of TikTok, ByteDance is considered one of the most valuable startups in the world today.
How does Tiktok work?
Getting started with TikTok
The basic function of TikTok is that users can film videos of themselves lip syncing, dancing or sketching. Videos — or TikToks — can be up to 15 seconds long, but they can also connect multiple clips for a total recording of up to 60 seconds. Recently, TikTok extended the time limit to three minutes for most users. Users can also upload longer videos recorded outside of the app.
TikTok also has video editing and customization tools. Users have access to a library of songs, effects, filters, and sound bites to add to their videos. You can also “duet” with someone by replying to a video, creating a split screen and endless reactions.
They can even add their own sounds and lip sync to another user’s video.
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Navigate TikTok
Let’s see how to navigate the app.
When you open TikTok, you’ll see a menu bar at the bottom. It has shortcuts to each of the following five pages in the app:
Home: Displays two feeds – “Following” and “For you” – that you can switch between.
Discover: Shows you mostly TikTok videos tagged with a trending hashtag.
Make Video: Opens the capture screen where you can film a video.
Inbox: Shows you all activities related to your videos. (Tap on the envelope to access DMs).
Profile: Your profile, which you and other users can see. You can make parts of it private.
Watch Tiktok Videos
In short, TikTok videos appear vertically on your screen just like videos from Vine or Instagram. You can interact with them with “hearts” which are the same as “likes”. After downloading and opening the TikTok app, you’ll instantly see curated recommended videos on the For You page. You can go to the Following page to view videos from users you follow – whether they’re friends or popular TikTokkers.
To see more new videos on both sides, swipe up on the screen or tap Home. You can also try tapping Discover (the magnifying glass icon next to the home button) to search for videos using keywords and hashtags. Within videos, you can tap the screen to pause them. Also look for the symbo on the right.
Is TikTok a surveillance tool for China?
TikTok is the latest to come under the US scrutiny as former President Donald Trump seeks to ban the app before leaving office. The app has come under “scrutiny” by the former government over fears it could be a surveillance tool for China, among other things.
Courts have repeatedly opposed Trump’s TikTok ban, ruling that the effort appears to be politically motivated. In fact, efforts to ban TikTok were put on hold in February 2021 when the US Department of Justice filed a motion signaling that the Biden administration could drop the cases entirely.
But Biden has said he has some concerns about TikTok. His government even scrutinizes Chinese tech companies and trade practices.
All in all, the US has yet to provide evidence that TikTok is a surveillance tool for China. And the US government currently allows the app to be used by millions of Americans across the country. So make of it what you want.
