The Chinese app Tiktok is still the newcomer among social media. It was only in 2018 that it became the successor to Musical.ly, a portal into which young people in particular uploaded short videos of themselves moving their lips to popular songs. Short videos are still Tiktok’s recipe for success today, but it’s no longer all about music. During the pandemic, the app gained users rapidly: people all over the world uploaded videos of themselves in lockdown – dancing, cooking or little comedy skits. You can now find everything in the app, from make-up videos to short lectures on French philosophy. The videos used to be a maximum of 15 seconds long, but today the app allows up to ten minutes.
Tiktok’s success has two main reasons: the design and the algorithm. About the design: Other social media such as Facebook or X, formerly Twitter, always fill the screen with several posts at the same time. Tiktok, on the other hand, only shows one video at a time. If you swipe up on the video, the app suggests a new one; if you swipe down, you go back to the previous one. The app is intuitive to use; If you download it, you can get started straight away.
You can subscribe to other users’ videos, but most films are recommendations from the algorithm. The app measures how long you stay on each video, whether you click “Like” or not. In this way, it learns the preferences of its users and can tailor the suggested videos to them more and more precisely. Tiktok is so good at this that people on the app often joke that the algorithm knows them better than they know themselves. The addictive factor is great, and there is no end to the video stream. In theory, you can swipe from video to video until the Earth falls into the sun. Overall, Tiktok is less a social media than a return to television, where you spend hours flipping from channel to channel.
Instagram and Snapchat have copied a lot from Tiktok
With this model the app is very successful. It has around 1.5 billion users worldwide, 150 million of which are in Europe, according to operator Bytedance. On average, users spend 95 minutes a day on the app, especially for younger people it is often more. This makes some people nervous: First of all, there are the other platforms that Tiktok competes with. In response to Tiktok’s success, they simply copied the model in a pragmatic and shameless way. Instagram and Snapchat have also introduced Tiktok-style algorithmic video suggestions in recent years.
But even in the centers of power there are concerns about the success of the Chinese app, with “Chinese” being the key word here. There is currently a legislative process in the United States that would result in a ban on the app. “This will certainly have an impact on the debate in Europe,” says political scientist and Tiktok expert Marcus Bösch. “However, the data protection concerns that politicians worry about are usually quite diffuse.” The Federal Commissioner for Data Protection, Ulrich Kelber, recommends that federal ministries and authorities not use the app on work devices. A year ago, employees of the EU Parliament and Commission were banned from downloading Tiktok onto their work cell phones. The reasoning was that the Chinese state could possibly access the devices via the app. Tiktok has since denied this several times. The EU Commission is now examining whether Tiktok is doing enough to protect minors and combat illegal content and, according to a report by the mirrorWhether the app specifically recommends content that aligns with the interests of the Chinese government.
Despite unease about the app, politicians recognize how important it is. “The AfD is very present on Tiktok,” says Bösch. “The party and its supporters reach more users than all other parties combined.” In response, Olaf Scholz recently even announced a Tiktok account for the federal government. It is unlikely that he will upload his first dance videos soon.