And despite President Trump’s best efforts to ban the app, the platform has persevered. As states were called on election night, millions of teenagers followed along with the results on TikTok. With the presidential election looming, young political commentators and collectives like TikTok for Biden used the platform to inform young users’ beliefs and votes. It Helped People Organize and Speak OutĪs the Black Lives Matter movement gained support across the country this summer, TikTok became a space where young activists could talk about police brutality, what it means to be an ally and criminal justice reform, as well as the app’s own relationship to Black creators.Ĭritics forced TikTok to contend with the rampant spread of disinformation on the platform, including its reanimation of the QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories. Patients, sick with coronavirus and other illnesses, have chronicled their health journeys and connected with the outside world from their hospital beds.
(Many have also documented their vaccinations on the platform.) Nurses, doctors and other frontline health workers used TikTok to talk about the risks of contracting Covid-19, explain the importance of mask-wearing and to break down misinformation on vaccines.
In 2020, many of their industries were hit hard by the pandemic and leveraged TikTok to promote fund-raising and relief efforts.Īs the coronavirus continued to spread, TikTok also played a key public health role. Warehouse workers, fast-food employees and baristas turned to TikTok to give others a glimpse of their lives, sometimes finding unintentional fame along the way. Service workers were some of the first people to embrace TikTok in 2018, and in 2020 people got a whole new view of their lives.
Major retailers like Sephora, Dunkin’ and GameStop even encouraged their employees to become TikTok influencers. Vintage resellers use TikTok to sell their wares and reinvigorate old styles. While physical storefronts were closed in the early months of the pandemic, new brands and shops popped up on TikTok, using the platform to drive online orders. “More than any other social network since Myspace it feels like a new experience, the emergence of a different kind of technology and a different mode of consuming media,” the journalist Kyle Chayka wrote in November. TikTok’s most obvious impact can be seen in the entertainment world. And in 2020, there was hardly a corner of society it didn’t touch. While it’s true that TikTok has transformed dance culture online, the platform has more broadly become a rich social and entertainment network. “TikTok is a children’s dancing app, where children will upload videos of themselves dancing, that children and adults can enjoy,” the comedian Nathan Fielder recently joked. Even those who weren’t totally sold on it couldn’t avoid the videos, which proliferated across platforms like Instagram, YouTube and Twitter.īy April 2020, TikTok had been downloaded more than 2 billion times in the fall, it had an estimated 850 million monthly active users.ĭespite its growth in size and scope, the uninitiated still largely view the app as a tool for other, much younger people to use. The app had everything: social commentary, comedy, crafting, memes, challenges, makeup tutorials and, of course, dances. 2021 has brought some memorable ones so far, with many of them prompting us to share our most embarrassing childhood memories-here are the best of them so far.It’s been well over two years since TikTok arrived in the United States in August 2018, offering a rejoinder to anyone who thought social media had lost its way. But no matter what, with an ever-revolving door of challenges and trends, TikTok never ceases to entertain. Sometimes it's a simple question and answer format stitched together. TikTok challenges are largely responsible for that joy.Ī TikTok challenge (noun) is often accompanied with a song that has gotten associated with a prompt. Hours go by as I watch people dance and laugh at funny people doing funny things. But scrolling on TikTok? A true joy of a scroll. Scrolling on Instagram is good for working yourself up about a lot of people ignoring the existence of Covid, but what if I’m not trying to get angry? Twitter, maybe? I genuinely feel the knots in my shoulders tightening as I scroll Twitter and take in the news each day. Scrolling on Netflix is tiresome and fruitless, and can even be frightening depending on what trailers your algorithm decides you should hear without warning (mine is a lot of true crime, hence the fright). We live in a golden age for scrolling, but not all scrolls are created equal.
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