Love It, Hate It, Fear It: How TikTok Changed Our Culture
Has there ever been a more expressively American app than TikTok, with its messy democratic creativity, energetic exhibitionism, utter lack of limits and vast variety of hustlers?
And yet in April, President Joe Biden signed into law a bill that would force the Chinese owners of TikTok, the video-app juggernaut, to either sell to a non-Chinese owner or face a ban.
Congress passed the bill, which gives the company nine months to strike a deal, with broad bipartisan support. Lawmakers say the app is a national security threat and that the Chinese government could lean on its owner, ByteDance, to obtain sensitive U.S. user data or influence content on the app to serve its interests.
There’s a long road of legal challenges and potential deal-making ahead before TikTok could be forced to change ownership or face a ban. The effort would have to survive lawsuits from TikTok and creators, a deep-pocketed buyer would have to be found and then clear regulatory approval, and after all that, Beijing could simply block a deal.
But imagining what a United States without TikTok would look like throws into sharp relief just how much the app has worked its way into the cultural firmament.
TikTok, which officially landed in the United States in 2018, was the most downloaded app in the country, and the world, in 2020, 2021 and 2022. It wasn’t that the elements of it were so new — compelling videos from randos had long been a staple of American pop culture — but TikTok put the pieces together in a new way.
Unlike Instagram, Facebook or Snapchat, TikTok didn’t build itself around social connections. Its goal is pure, uncut entertainment. The algorithm ingested every data point it could from what users skipped, liked or shared — and spat it directly into the maddeningly habit-forming “For You” page. Fans whispered reverently that it knew them better than they knew themselves.
But even more striking has been what the app has done outside its boundaries. Even if you’ve never opened the app, you’ve lived in a culture that exists downstream of what happens there.
What follows are ways of understanding how TikTok became part of American life.