TikTok has only been around in the US since August 2018, but its become the defining social media app of Gen Z.The app once known as Musical.ly was bought by the Beijing-based internet company ByteDance in 2017. Though it relaunched as virtually identical to Musical.ly, TikTok quickly transformed into something more like Vine: a goofy place for weird comedy, memes, and ironic inside jokes. In doing so, the platform has made famous tons of fledgling comedians, singers, dancers, actors, and normal teenagers becoming TikTok famous is now a popular goal for high schoolers.Its legions of underage users, of course, have landed the company in hot water on several occasions. In February 2019, it was hit by a record-breaking $5.7 million FTC fine for illegally collecting data from children under 13.That it is based in Beijing, too, has made it a target of skepticism. TikTok has been accused of censoring pro-Hong Kong videos, and it was found to be banning LGBTQ content in countries like Turkey. TikTok is now facing an investigation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, which aims to determine if the app poses a threat to American citizens.At least one other person is not thrilled about TikToks rise to dominance: Mark Zuckerberg. The Facebook founder has tried and failed to buy, then kill TikTok with his copycat product, Lasso, which did not make any inroads.To learn more about TikTok, listen to Today, Explained. Voxs daily explainer podcast has an episode all about the app and another one that breaks down a TikTok meme, OK boomer.25 minutes agoRebecca JenningsHas TikTok made us better? Or much, much worse?For years, murmurs of a US TikTok ban have left users and creators furious and terrified that a social media app that had become central to their lives could be taken away. Again and again, the ban never actually materialized, and users continued to enjoy what had, since 2018, become one of the most creative, vital, and paradigm-shifting developments in internet culture. But this is no longer a boy who cried wolf situation. On Friday, the Supreme Court signaled that it would uphold the law signed by President Biden last April requiring TikToks Beijing-based parent company ByteDance to divest TikTok from its Chinese ownership or risk facing a ban in the US. Read Article >May 17, 2024Rebecca JenningsWhen TikTok therapy is more lucrative than seeing clientsDr. 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 ones mental health: You do everything the world asks of you, so no one would ever know you feel empty inside, you dont 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. Shes 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 theyre 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 shell 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 arent actual diagnoses? Maybe. Or maybe not.Read Article >Apr 24, 2024Nicole NareaIs the new TikTok ban for real?President Joe Biden has signed a bill to ban TikTok, starting a nine-month countdown until the social media apps 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.Read Article >Mar 14, 2024Nicole NareaTikTok could avoid a ban with a sale. Finding a buyer wont be easy.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 apps 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.Read Article >Mar 6, 2024Rebecca JenningsGen Z is officially old enough to feel old. Feel old yet?I keep seeing people asking the internet, How old do I look? Each time, I want to tell them, No, dont do that, youre 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 isnt really about the individual person; its a reaction to the larger internet discourse around young peoples 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, theres a general sense that kids today are freaking out about wrinkles and retinol way more than anyone else was at their age. Read Article >Dec 13, 2023Rebecca JenningsTikTok isnt creating false support for Palestine. Its just reflecting whats already there.For the past month, TikTok has tried to assure business leaders, influencers, and Jewish organizations that it isnt 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 Americas 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 its being used to downplay Hamas terrorism, wrote Senator Marco Rubio on X, formerly known as Twitter, in November. Read Article >Jun 8, 2023Sara MorrisonHow a carmakers mistake created the ultimate internet challengeIts safe to assume that 17-year-old Markell Hughes wasnt 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 Hughess 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.Read Article >Dec 21, 2022Rebecca JenningsThe irresistible voyeurism of day in my life videosMy 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. Read Article >Sep 7, 2022Rebecca JenningsThe sex worker teachingTikTokabout legal brothelsTikTokers have always found clever ways around the platforms 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. Dac uses another descriptor: The Modern Working Girl.Since 2016, Dac her stage name has worked at the Mustang Ranch, Nevadas first legal brothel. Now shes 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 shes 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). Read Article >Aug 31, 2022Rebecca JenningsSo your kid wants to be an influencerWhen they were 4 years old, Benjamin Burroughss kids became obsessed with a YouTube channel called Ryans World. The appeal wasnt all that mysterious: In each Ryans 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 Ryans World went beyond the screen; almost immediately, each of Burroughss children asked if they could be a YouTuber, too. We said no, says Burroughs, laughing. He and his wifes concerns were fairly standard: They felt weird about monetizing their children, they didnt want to create a digital footprint that couldnt be erased, and they didnt 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.Read Article >Aug 17, 2022Rebecca JenningsTikTok is great for spreading political messages and conspiracy theoriesA man sets his tactical gear bag next to the assault rifle on his bed, above which hangs an American flag. Dont mind me, he says, Im 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. Its go time, he continues. Everybody knows exactly what Im talking about. (Hes 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 its 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 companys attempts to be viewed as apolitical, its now one of the most widely consumed sources of discourse, political and otherwise.Read Article >Aug 10, 2022Rebecca JenningsHow the internet broke the calendarA couple weeks ago, I saw a video of a bunch of matching women in a meticulously organized formation singing Smash Mouths 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, its become clear that TikTok works on a set calendar, except its 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. Read Article >Mar 22, 2022Rebecca Jennings12 hours online and zero regrets: A day with the internets funniest meme curatorWelcome 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 Instagrams 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. Read Article >Mar 15, 2022Rebecca JenningsWhere teen influencers go to become actorsIts 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 theyre 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 theyre supposed to do next. Read Article >Mar 8, 2022Rebecca JenningsA day in the digital life of an internet it-girlWelcome to 24 Hours Online, where we ask one extremely internetty person to document a day in their life looking at screens.If youre on a certain corner of Gen Z-leftist-feminist-media-criticism TikTok, you already know Rayne Fisher-Quann, a 20-year-old writer whos 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 shes built equally formidable audiences on Tumblr, Twitter, and most recently TikTok, where she discusses feminism, leftism, mental illness, and, well, herself.Read Article >Mar 1, 2022Rebecca JenningsWarTikTokis a messIt 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 youll notice its 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! Read Article >Feb 22, 2022Rebecca JenningsIm a creator. Youre a creator. Were all creators!It was early 2019, maybe, when the kids Id interview whod 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? Didnt 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 thats a sign of societys 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?Read Article >Feb 15, 2022Rebecca JenningsCrypto, for cool girlsWhether we like it or not, its happening, the woman with the microphone is saying. I know it feels really fringey right now, but in, like, three minutes were going to be living in this world. Im 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, were told, it doesnt have to stay that way. Read Article >Feb 1, 2022Rebecca JenningsFashion is justTikToknowHere is a list of fashion trends that, according to TikTok, are predicted to become a thing in 2022:Read Article >Jan 25, 2022Rebecca JenningsYou go viral overnight. Now how do you get rich?Monique Black, a 27-year-old fashion influencer from Detroit, likely wouldnt have a clue how much to charge brands if it werent for Twitter. Shed 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. Its 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. Read Article >Jan 21, 2022Rebecca JenningsStop canceling normal people who go viralWhats worse, ghosting someone you met on a dating app or calling up that guys 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 internets main character.What Im 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. Read Article >Jan 11, 2022Rebecca JenningsThe misery of the Hype HouseIts 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 its 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 whats going on in this bizarre, entirely-uneventful-but-also-sort-of-fascinating television show, its 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 others clout to build more of it. TikTok, at that point, only had a handful of stars to break out beyond the app the Hype Houses Charli DAmelio, Addison Rae, and DAmelios 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. Read Article >Jan 4, 2022Rebecca JenningsThe exhausting concept of the 2022 rebrandTheres a thing going around on TikTok right now about rebranding ones self for 2022; in other words, leapfrogging the concept of the New Years resolution and transforming into an entirely different person instead. The trends 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.Its 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 Years 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 arent really in vogue anymore, wrote my coworker Nisha Chittal in her most recent newsletter, and it truly does.Read Article >Dec 21, 2021Rebecca JenningsThe year of garbage internet trendsFifty 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 dont 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 couldnt do so in person? Youre telling me you dont 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?Read Article >Dec 14, 2021Rebecca JenningsIs a new kind of religion forming on the internet?It just doesnt sit right with me, begins a TikTok by a user named Evelyn Juarez. Its 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 isnt about what actually happened there. Its 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 Xs 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. Read Article >More Stories