During winter break, I found myself caught between a rock and a hard place: to download TikTok, or to not download TikTok?

Over this past year, I knew it existed, but I never understood it. I was resistant, disposed to look past the hype, thinking it was stupid and something for middle schoolers. But after my friends finally convinced me to take the plunge and download the app, I’m never turning back.

TikTok is a short-form, video-sharing social media app owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-based technology company. The app was originally launched in China in 2012, and then expanded to the U.S. market in 2017. The app didn’t seem to reach its peak until this past year, when the platform hit 1.5 billion total downloads across the Apple app store and Google Play, according to Business Insider. Many of these downloads can be attributed to its users in India, who accounted for 31% of the apps downloads, followed by China which made up 11.5% of the apps downloads, then the U.S. which made up 8.2%. Nonetheless, a small portion of these users can also be found across Wesleyan’s campus, as the app seems to be taking the student body by storm, but like me, most were skeptical at first.

“For like at least a year, probably more, I kept seeing targeted ads on Facebook for TikTok that were just so cringey,” Dotan Appelbaum ’21 explained. “I thought, ‘This is for middle schoolers, this is awful, I’m never downloading this.’ And then, I read an article a while ago when the whole ‘ok boomer’ thing was happening. It was about how an annoying person on TikTok said something annoying and then 1,000 people commented ‘ok boomer.’ So, I wanted to watch it, but I had to download the app first. Then, I just started scrolling through it, and it became a serious problem last semester, and I spent so much time scrolling through TikTok.” 

Ginger Hollander ’20, another avid TikToker, agreed with Appelbaum’s sentiment. 

“For a long time, I was consuming TikTok content from Instagram and Twitter, and I was like, I don’t need TikTok, I’ll get way too into it,” she said. “Then, we talked about it in my class last semester, Critical Data Studies with Professor Ben Haber. After we did a reading about it, he started off that class projecting his three favorite TikToks onto the screen. I was like, these are so good. And then the next week, people came to class and said that they had downloaded TikTok, and I thought, maybe I should do that.”

Now, Hollander, who goes by the username @drinkmorewater666, has posted over 70 videos to her account, which has more than 600 followers and a collective 7,947 likes. In addition to sex education videos, Hollander makes one of the most popular kinds of videos on TikTok, which are dancing videos. A large section of the app is made up of people dancing to popular songs such as “Say So” by Doja Cat, or “The Box” by Roddy Ricch. These choreographed dances, started by TikTok stars such as Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae, have gone viral. 

“I think there’s definitely a few of us who are out here earnestly doing TikTok dances but as someone who is doing them, I think it’s the most embarrassing thing to be doing on TikTok as an adult,” Hollander remarked. “But I don’t care and I’m not judging anyone else who’s doing them. I love to do it.” 

“The popular TikTok songs will come on at parties and everyone will dance to it,” Dalia Ramirez ’20 said. “I didn’t realize how big it was at Wes.”

However, some students don’t understand the hype, and choose to make other types of videos. 

“It’s really important to have your thing, and I’m still figuring out exactly what that thing is, but you can’t do everything,” Appelbaum said. “I’m thinking that my thing is complaining about people—and being absurd is also something I’m interested in.”

Appelbaum said that the inspiration to make his own TikTok videos came from the positive responses he was receiving from his Instagram stories. 

“I put some stuff on my Instagram stories that are just absurd, that people find very funny,” Appelbaum said. “A lot of them are just like screenshots of the top of my head with text above me. For example, yesterday I posted one that said, ‘Nothing you can say to me is more offensive to my heritage than eating chocolate hummus in front of me.’ That I feel strongly about. A lot of them tend to be related to Judaism.” 

The videos on TikTok feature a diverse array of topics, ranging from videos of cats and dogs to magic tricks to relationship therapists offering advice. Ramirez pointed out that she’s a fan of the “how-to” videos, as they’ve taught her a lot of important information.

“I’m learning things,” Ramirez said. “There’s this one lady who teaches you the details of how to get out of your medical debt, which is important. She says what you have to say on the phone to make sure that you get an itemized invoice, and that most medical debt goes dead at a certain point. She just gives you all of the details, and I was like if I’m ever in medical debt, I will get out of thousands of dollars just from TikTok.”

Ramirez has also learned how to make many different types of foods, such as a special recipe for ramen that she now loves. 

“They tell you how long to boil the egg, then you put in ice water, and then you take the ramen water out because it’s bad for you, and then you re-boil the water and put in spinach and sesame oil. I could’ve looked the recipe up, but it showed me it in 30 seconds.”

But TikTok, like many other social media apps, is not immune to controversy. Much of its content is censored, and the app is strict when it comes to posting anything that could be even slightly perceived as sexual, violent, or even political. In November 2019, the U.S. government announced that it was opening a national security investigation into TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, after U.S. lawmakers expressed concern that the Chinese company may be censoring politically sensitive content. In part, this investigation may have been triggered by a story done by The Washington Post, who reported that a 17-year-old user in New Jersey was banned from the app after she posted a video that criticized the Chinese government’s treatment of the Uighur ethnic minority. 

“I tried [to post] a few sex positive ones, and they were so quickly removed that it wasn’t worth it,” Hollander said. “They’re really strict about censorship, so there’ve been multiple videos where I’m not wearing a bra, and you cannot see my nipples, but see indents on my shirt, and those have been removed.”

Although users have been censored and silenced on the platform, there are many who have found immense fame, including Wesleyan’s very own Alvaro Chavez ’21, who has over 69,300 followers under the username @alvarochavez586.  

“I got the app a couple weeks before Fall semester ended,” Chavez explained. “I just started fucking around with my friends and then I remember I made one TikTok where I was being playfully mean about people’s social anxiety, some weird shit, and then I took a nap and when I woke up I was like at 50k.”

However, Chavez wasn’t expecting this initial fame. 

“I don’t really get the math behind the original post,” Chavez said. “I know that the way the algorithm works is that people initially comment a lot, or like a lot, or send it to their friends a lot so the algorithm notices and picks it up and starts putting it on the For You page for people that don’t follow you…. And that’s how something goes viral. But for that original post where I had like five followers and they were all my friends, I don’t exactly get how that happened at all.”

Part of the appeal of TikTok is that many of these people started off as “normal” kids, without any intention of gaining any type of fame. Many on campus aspire to reach the same type of viral fame. 

“I want to be TikTok famous, that would be so cool,” Appelbaum said. “It’s easy and it’s possible. I think that because of the format of it. Everything you post is about other people seeing it, unless your account is private… you’re posting for an audience. Because of that, so many people can become TikTok famous. There are several people on this campus who have 50, 60,000 followers. But if you were really looking at the larger picture, that’s not really famous on TikTok. Several million is famous, but it’s still a huge reach, you know?”

“I say I want to be TikTok famous, and I think it would be funny in theory, but I think that if it actually happened I wouldn’t like it,” Hollander said. “The essay I wrote for my data studies class was about that one TikTok I did that got 15,000 views, and I got a lot of crap for not shaving my armpits in it. It was in a way that’s like, clearly you’re a 12-year-old who doesn’t know that that’s an option. There’s a lot of comments about that, which I think are dumb. I can’t imagine that it was just a few thousand views, and I can’t imagine looking the way I do and getting exposed to a large audience. I’m only going to get more stuff like that, which is scary.”

However easy (or not) it may be to become TikTok famous, it’s also important to be conscious of the content you’re consuming. 

“There’s definitely a way to be conscious of how you scroll,” Hollander said. “I saw a TikTok once that was like, if you’re only seeing white people on your feed, it’s because you’re only watching white people. Be aware of what kind of content you’re consuming and why, and if you want to make it a space that’s very wholesome, it’s not hard to just watch dog and cat videos and that’s it. There’s a lot of problems with the app but there’s a way to use it in a good way.”

And as for the future popularity of the app, that’s unclear. Oftentimes the platform is compared to Vine, a similar short-form video sharing app that shuttered its doors in 2017.

“I do think TikTok will last,” Ramirez said. “There’s a niche for it, because everyone really missed Vine. Everyone really missed short form, funny and helpful video content.” 

“It’s very much small with people our age,” Bodhi Small ’22 said. “It’s large at Wes, but nowhere near as large as it is with younger people… I don’t really think it’s seen as cool among current college students.”

But perhaps for now, at least, TikTok is here to stay, especially on Wesleyan’s campus.

“I am happy because the stuff I post is obviously silly but it’s not exactly a game to me,” Chavez said. “I’m in improv and I’m in sketch comedy here, and just as that is reflective of what I want to do after, so is what I post on TikTok. Even if it’s just about practicing characters and fleshing out different impressions, I’m really happy it happened.”

 

Jane Herz can be reached at jherz@wesleyan.edu.