Until last week, I had never gone to TikTok.
Sure, I had seen a number of videos on my other social media feeds originally posted to the short-form video hosting service but I had never typed tiktok.com into a computer browser or smart phone.
My recent foray to TikTok was prompted by a VOA assignment to report on the key arguments that would urgently be presented to the U.S. Supreme Court. I featured several brief clips of some of the most popular TikTok videos to establish a feel for the platform whose foreign owners and chief executive contend has been unfairly targeted by U.S. lawmakers who have exaggerated fears China’s government will use data harvested from its American users (all 170 million of them) to harm U.S. national security.
The company, having hired a former U.S. solicitor general, along with a lawyer representing TikTok’s content creators, asked the justices to overturn a law that compels ByteDance to divest its U.S. assets or shut off TikTok in the United States by January 19, the day before the inauguration of the country’s 47th president. You can read the highlights of the back-and-forth among the Supreme Court justices, the current U.S. solicitor general and the TikTok lawyers in my subsequent VOA story filed immediately after the oral arguments.
My flirtation with TikTok has not led to me into a relationship. I have not set up an account. Perusing the top TikTok videos for my story research left me unimpressed. I found the majority of the content boring, although a few of the videos were whimsical but did not rise to the level of fascination that I would have thought to share any with friends or family. But that did for others happen billions of times with those most popular TikTok videos.
As a boomer I am probably a couple of generations senior to the targeted demographic. Or maybe I just have better things to do than view micro skits, memes or influencers lip synching and shaking to songs I’ve never heard. Don’t get me wrong, I do not reject any pop creativity after I left high school (the era of supergroups Boston, Chicago and Supertramp). For example, I really enjoy the Bruno Mars-Rosé duet in the silly but fun cross-cultural earworm APT (which has 854 million views on YouTube since its release last October).
TikTok, in the eyes of its shareholders, has certainly done something right, despite being banned in India and several other countries.
Last time I checked, the market cap of its parent, ByteDance, was in the neighborhood of $200 billion (not a typo).
TikTok’s stickiness is attributed to a secret sauce that would be the envy of any other social media platform or even McDonald’s — its algorithm, which promotes content not primarily on follower numbers but more subjective engagement quality. The platform also relies on AI to continuously refine content recommendations based on user behavior and that allows the ByteDance-owned algorithm to be more adaptive than those of other platforms. Or so they say.
It is that algorithm the company seeks to protect at all costs, even at the potential loss of its biggest market, the United States. (Although if the ban is enacted it can be anticipated that millions of American TikTok content creators and users would quickly be chanting the letters V-P-N and lead a mass skirting of the firewall, ironically emulating the technique of those online in the People’s Republic of China to enjoy the websites of VOA and other forbidden fruits.
President Biden approved a ban, at the end of 2022, that prohibits the use of TikTok by the federal government’s four million employees on devices owned by its agencies, although there are limited exceptions for law enforcement, national security and security research purposes.
As I pointed out in my VOA reports, both Biden and Donald Trump were previously in sync on backing the ‘ban it’ approach over the free speech argument amid the national security concerns of the U.S. intelligence community and others. But Trump, pointing to the popularity of his 2024 election campaign videos on TikTok, has expressed a change of heart.
Although most of the justices last Friday seemed likely to vote to uphold the ban, if the Supreme Court gives TikTok a reprieve of even a few days beyond the January 19th deadline, Trump might be able to cut a deal for the sale of the platform to allay the national security concerns. If that were to happen, Trump — the Twitter president last time — might be known this time around as the TikTok president.