Drew Harwell
On the night Shelby Renae first went viral on TikTok, she felt so giddy she could barely sleep. She’d spent the evening painting her nails, refreshing her phone between each finger — 20,000 views; 40,000 — and by the next morning, after her video crossed 3 million views, she decided it had changed her life.
She didn’t really understand why it had done so well. The 16-second clip of her playing the video game “Fortnite” was funny, she thought — but not, like, millions-of-views funny. She wasn’t a celebrity: She grew up in Idaho; her last job was at a pizza shop. But this was just how the world’s most popular app worked. TikTok’s algorithm had made her a star.
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.
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. 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. Yet still, in her off hours, she does what all her friends do: watches TikTok. “It will suck you in for hours,” she said.
If you have not used TikTok, you are rapidly becoming the global exception. 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.
Part 1: How TikTok ate the internet.
Part 2: Sorry you went viral. (Coming soon.)
Part 3: As Washington wavers, Beijing exerts control. (Coming soon.)
Its dominance, as estimated by the internet firms Cloudflare, Data.ai and Sensor Tower, is hard to overstate. TikTok’s website was visited last year more often than Google. 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. The average American viewer watches TikTok for 80 minutes a day — more than the time spent on Facebook and Instagram, combined.
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. 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. And while half of TikTok’s U.S. 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. (AARP last year even unveiled a how-to guide.)
More than just a hit, TikTok has blown up the model of what a social network can be. Silicon Valley taught the world a style of online connectivity built on hand-chosen interests and friendships. TikTok doesn’t care about those. Instead, it unravels for viewers an endless line of videos selected by its algorithm, then learns a viewer’s tastes with every second they watch, pause or scroll. You don’t tell TikTok what you want to see. It tells you. And the internet can’t get enough.
“We’re not talking about a dance app,” said Abbie Richards, a researcher who studies disinformation on TikTok, where she has half a million followers. “We’re talking about a platform that’s shaping how a whole generation is learning to perceive the world.”
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