Planet TikTok
August 06, 2024 at 12:07AMYi-Ling Liu, a technology writer working on a book about the Chinese internet, discusses the history and future of TikTok; ByteDance, the $50 billion company behind it; and what’s lost if the app is banned in the US.
Instead of showing users content based on social connections—accounts they follow and accounts that follow them—it is tailored to their individual habits and even instincts. If, for instance, you engage with content related to woodworking or a particular kind of dance, the algorithm will serve you more content on these subjects, regardless of who created it. This allows for a feeling of “surprise,” the researcher Marcus Bösch told me. It’s “like falling in love with a stranger very fast.” People describe the experience with a sense of enchantment. The tech blogger Eugene Wei called it a “rapid, hyper-efficient matchmaker.” He compared it to the Sorting Hat from the Harry Potter books, divvying up users into subcultures. A writer at Mashable praised the app as a “divine digital oracle” after it identified her as bisexual before she realized she was interested in women. Researchers found that TikTok could send users into a “flow state” in which they lose track of time.
With its younger user base, more fragmented content, and amped-up algorithm, TikTok has exacerbated many of the ills of social media, from mental health crises to addiction. According to the mobile research firm data.ai, the average American TikTok user spent about twenty-nine hours a month on the app in 2022, more than Facebook and Instagram combined. If data is the new oil, the business school professor Scott Galloway wrote that year, TikTok provides “sweet crude like the world has never seen, ready to be algorithmically refined into rocket fuel.”
TikTok has in effect become a Chinese scapegoat for anxieties about the power that all private tech companies wield, regardless of where they come from—their ability to surveil and influence our behavior, ensnare us in an interminable feed, and mine our attention for profit. After decades of trying to “connect the tracks” of the global Internet, we will not solve its problems by letting its trains derail.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/08/05/planet-tiktok/
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