DIGITAL LIFE

TikTok: Chinese social network that already mesmerized 1.5 billion now attracts disaffected

NEW YORK city - do you know How to start describing Instagram or Facebook to someone who has spent the last 20 years in a cave? This is one of the challenges of talking about TikTok, the social video network that is conquering the youth world - and you may have heard if any preteen is part of your life.
The easiest way to understand TikTok is to download the app on their mobile phone (as more than 1.5 billion people have done in the last year and a half) and watch the details and the funniest videos that are the hallmark of the new platform. But don't do it now - or you run for hours mesmerized by the app.
TikTok is a collection of short videos of about 15 seconds, usually filmed with the user-facing selfie camera, doing some clowning, dubbing the song, or responding to some of the other TikTok that went viral.
These are tiny doses of entertainment, spliced together. You can follow your friends ' posts or simply scroll down the “For You” page, a popular video sequence based on your likes and the videos you watched until the end.
The app was launched in 2017 by the Chinese company ByteDance. As with social networking apps, the adoption curve was slow in the early months, and then exploded - because everyone wants to be around friends.

Pranks, dance steps and lots of cats
Part of TikTok's success has to do with the spirit of the posted videos. Facebook, Instagram, or attempts to show off a glamorous life or competes for likes, like on Instagram. At TikTok, nobody takes themselves seriously.
The typical video shows the teenager to simulating a conversation with his mother (which is characterized by a towel or a T-shirt on his head), and the drama of studying for a test or an attempt to copy the fancy dance steps (which are not at all simple). , given the large number of tutorials on how to do them).
Another common theme is pranks with friends, imitations of movie scenes, and - of course - cats, many cats. Almost every video has a soundtrack, and rapper Lil Nas X hit # 1 on the Billboard chart after one of his songs, “Old Town Road,” hit TikTok.
Describing attempts will never do justice to the experience of using the app. The creators of these microvideos seem to be really having fun (many end up laughing out loud in the middle of the videos).Although there are already some TikTok celebrities, the general feeling is still of innocence and wonder, like that magical period when Brazilians discovered Orkut.
Advertising interruptions are minimal, and it is easy to spend minutes – or hours-watching one video after another.

The Facebook reaction
Facebook Instagram and WhatsApp are also owned by the TikTok headquarters, which, of course, has not gone unnoticed by the success of TikTok's Facebook headquarters, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp. After creating the Stories function, a brazen copy of Snapchat, Instagram launched a test of its version of TikTok.
The functionality is in experimental period for Brazilian users and has been named scenes. The videos are also 15 seconds long and can use as a soundtrack the songs offered in an official catalog.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Robby Stein, Product Director of Instagram, stated that TikTok "deserves credit for popularizing the” microvids" format. But he says that the idea of creating music videos with a musical background is a universal idea and that “your friends are all on Instagram. And that's true only for Instagram."Facebook Instagram, although there is still no official decision on the adoption of the scenes function in the rest of the world, is hard to imagine that Instagram will let TikTok rule alone in the rest of the world, especially when it is known that in 2016 Facebook tried to buy the Musical.ly, Chinese Voice-Over app that was eventually bought Bytedance, also Chinese, and gave rise to TikTok.
Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, made public criticism of TikTok in a speech held in October. According to him, TikTok was censoring videos related to the Hong Kong protests.
"Is that the internet we want?", said Zuckerberg. In response to the comment, the company stated in a statement that “it is not influenced by foreign governments” and that “it does not take videos [from the platform] based on the presence of content related to the Hong Kong protests”.

Political risk?
American politicians, however, also seem concerned about the growth of the app. Democratic and Republican senators advocate a review of Chinese applications with large numbers of users in the United States, particularly TikTok.
The app would be susceptible to pressure from the Chinese government and could “support and cooperate with intelligence agencies controlled by the Chinese Communist Party”, according to a statement by Senators Chuck Schumer and Tom Cotton.
ByteDance states that the application is not available on the Chinese market and that its data centers stay out of the country, therefore “are not subject to Chinese laws”.
Even the Islamic State tried to use TikTok to recruit militants into the social network. The videos (which were removed from the service) showed images of armed combatants, with a musical background of songs by the fundamentalist group.
The use of social networks as a vector of radicalization is not new, Of course, but the growth of the social network – and the fact that one third of its users are under the age of 18 – will certainly generate more headaches for ByteDance.
But geopolitical repercussions are the ultimate concern of TikTok users. For them, the important thing is to have a space of expression without the filters, without the expectations and, above all, without the seriousness of the social networks.
You think Facebook's a pain in the ass? Instagram's a likes championship (with a million ads in the middle)? Maybe it's time to try TikTok.

Sérgio T. Júnior, Brazil