It went from nothing to billions of users in the space of a few years.
In this episode, we look at the rise of TikTok, the criticisms it has faced, and how it is changing technology patterns all over the world.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about an app that is installed on one in four phones across the world, an app that has caught the attention of presidents, and an app that 10 years ago didn't even exist.
[00:00:36] The app is, of course, TikTok.
[00:00:39] Now, unless you have been living under a rock, you will probably have heard of TikTok.
[00:00:44] It’s an incredibly popular app that has gone from nothing to almost two billion users.
[00:00:50] Maybe you’re one of them, maybe you’re not.
[00:00:52] In either case, the story of the growth of TikTok is fascinating.
[00:00:57] So in this episode we’ll look at where it came from, how it exploded, why it is so popular, not just from an emotional point of view but also the technology that makes this possible, and look at how this one app took over the world.
[00:01:14] Let’s get right into it.
[00:01:16] We're looking at TikTok. We may be banning TikTok, we may be doing some other things. There are a couple of options, but a lot of things are happening, so we'll see what happens.
[00:01:26] But we are looking at a lot of alternatives with respect to TikTok.
[00:01:32] That was former president Donald Trump in July of 2020.
[00:01:37] Sure, it might not have been the most eloquent of speeches, but the point is that the President of the United States publicly announced that he was looking at banning TikTok, an app that started out as a way for teenage girls to record themselves singing along to music.
[00:01:55] So, the big question we’ll look at today is…why?
[00:02:00] Now, the first point to address is one that might sound like a simple question.
[00:02:05] What is TikTok?
[00:02:07] Is it a social network?
[00:02:09] Is it a social media app?
[00:02:11] Is it a video sharing platform?
[00:02:14] Is it an entertainment service?
[00:02:17] It’s a hard one to put a label on, but it’s a bit of everything.
[00:02:22] Let me quickly explain how it works from a superficial level, just in case you are not a TikTok user.
[00:02:29] When you open the TikTok app, you are immediately presented with a short video created by another TikTok user.
[00:02:37] The video starts playing right away.
[00:02:40] You can do nothing, and the video will keep playing, and then play again when it gets to the end, you can swipe up, to be shown a new video, you can “like” the video by pressing a heart button, you can comment on it, you can share it, you can bookmark it, etcetera.
[00:02:57] On the surface of it, simple, you might be thinking.
[00:03:01] Based on this description alone, it sounds a little like YouTube or any other video sharing app.
[00:03:09] But as we’ll come to discuss shortly, this design has important consequences, and is a big part of why TikTok has experienced such explosive growth.
[00:03:22] And when it comes to this explosive growth Tik Tok has grown faster than any other app in history.
[00:03:30] You might have heard that TikTok is a Chinese app, but it is actually an interesting mix of Chinese and American, or at least apps that built off success both in China and in the United States.
[00:03:44] So, a brief history.
[00:03:46] The origin of TikTok is an app called Musical.ly, which was built by two Chinese friends in Shanghai back in 2014.
[00:03:56] It was an app that allowed people to create and share short lip-synching videos, videos where people pretended to sing songs at the same time as the music.
[00:04:09] But, Musical.ly never really took off in China, it was never a great success in its home market.
[00:04:17] Instead, it found early traction, initial success, across the Pacific in the United States.
[00:04:25] And specifically, with a market of teenage girls, who absolutely loved it.
[00:04:32] Teenage girls might love to lip-synch, to dance and pretend to sing along with pop songs, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and there are only so many teenage girls in the world.
[00:04:45] In any case, Musical.ly was clearly onto something.
[00:04:50] Back in China, a Beijing-based technology company called ByteDance, was developing its own video-sharing app that was heavily inspired by, some might even say directly copied from, Musical.ly.
[00:05:05] In September of 2016, it launched an app called Douyin, which was available exclusively in China. Within a year, it had 100 million users, and was racking up one billion views of its videos every single day.
[00:05:24] Clearly, it was onto something big, and so it launched an international version of the app, which was made available outside China.
[00:05:34] This app was, of course, TikTok.
[00:05:38] Now, Douyin and TikTok are very similar, but not exactly the same. They look very similar if you just open the app, but Douyin has some more advanced features, such as the ability to buy things directly within the app.
[00:05:56] Anyway, both apps were growing fast - Douyin within China, and TikTok internationally.
[00:06:05] To accelerate its international growth, in 2017 ByteDance bought Musical.ly, this app that was super-successful in the United States with this niche audience of teenage girls.
[00:06:20] The price tag was a reported billion dollars - a lot of money, but it would turn out to be quite the bargain.
[00:06:30] In 2018 the acquisition was complete, and Musical.ly merged with TikTok, becoming one joint app, with the copied app buying the original version it was copied from.
[00:06:44] Over the next few years, TikTok began to advertise heavily in the United States, spending by some estimates hundreds of millions of dollars a month on advertising, trying to hook new users on the app.
[00:07:00] Companies like Facebook and Snapchat were all too happy to accept TikTok’s money. They were getting paid handsomely, and besides, it didn’t seem like a threat - a Chinese app had never had any real success in the United States.
[00:07:16] American culture is unique, it’s not something a foreign app can easily crack, especially an app from a culture as different to the US’s as China’s.
[00:07:27] But there was something that these American technology companies hadn’t understood properly, or at least hadn’t properly appreciated.
[00:07:38] Tiktok was different.
[00:07:40] It didn’t rely on cultural relevance or understanding, it worked in a completely different way.
[00:07:48] And this brings us back to what I hinted at earlier, in terms of the design of the app, how TikTok works on the surface.
[00:07:58] When you think of the other social media apps you might use, think Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, or Twitter, they typically work on a “social graph” basis.
[00:08:11] Going back to the early days of Facebook, you would be friends with people, Facebook would understand that you had a relationship with them, and show you their photos and updates.
[00:08:23] As these products grew and became more advanced, more complexity was added to this.
[00:08:29] You could follow pages of businesses, you could express your interests, Facebook would see who you sent messages to, it bought Instagram, and so on.
[00:08:40] Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat all worked in slightly different ways, but the principle was the same: you create an account, you create connections between people, and you see the content that these people post.
[00:08:56] But the problem here is that this isn’t always what people want to see and engage with.
[00:09:01] You might be Facebook friends with someone you went to university with 15 years ago, or even school 60 years ago, but are you interested in what they are doing now?
[00:09:13] You might have chosen to follow someone on Instagram or Twitter because you’re interested in their tips about making cookies, but do you want to hear their opinion about the World Cup?
[00:09:25] Sometimes, but often the answer is “no”.
[00:09:29] TikTok completely bypassed this, it avoided the question of forming cross-directional relationships between people altogether.
[00:09:39] Yes, you can follow people on TikTok, in the same way as you can on other social networks, but TikTok’s focus is on serving you videos that it thinks you will like, regardless of who made them.
[00:09:53] It’s the quality of the content that matters, not your relationship with the person who created it.
[00:10:00] That’s why, when you open the TikTok app, it opens on a page called “For you”, which could be any kind of video that the app thinks you will enjoy.
[00:10:11] And how does it decide what you will enjoy?
[00:10:14] Well, here’s the clever part.
[00:10:17] On a very superficial level, you can say it’s “the algorithm”, the computer code that decides what you like based on what you have liked before.
[00:10:26] But let’s go several levels deeper, because it’s not just a case of there being an extremely smart set of computer code sitting on a server somewhere.
[00:10:36] We need to talk about two things.
[00:10:39] First, the design of the TikTok app, and how this is different to other social apps.
[00:10:46] Remember, you only ever see one video per screen, so the TikTok algorithm can get a sense of your thoughts about that video based on the actions you take.
[00:10:57] Do you swipe up right away to move onto another video? OK, that indicates it wasn’t interesting.
[00:11:05] Did you watch it all? Good, that’s a promising start.
[00:11:09] Did you watch it all and then tap the heart button? Better, you probably like it.
[00:11:15] Did you watch it all several times, tap the heart button, follow the person who made it, then send it to lots of people and save the video? Boom, I think we’re in business, you clearly like this a lot.
[00:11:28] When you contrast this to the information that an app like Facebook or Twitter gets, where there are often multiple pieces of content on the screen, Facebook and Twitter have more difficulty figuring out what you actually think about something.
[00:11:44] If you scrolled past something, did you just miss it, or were you not interested in it? If you stopped scrolling, which piece of content were you looking at? Did you stop because you agreed or disagreed with that piece of content?
[00:11:59] See, the entire design of TikTok makes it far easier for the algorithm to figure out what you like and don’t like.
[00:12:08] And when it comes to the actual content on TikTok, the videos that users make, the TikTok algorithm is very good at recognising what is in a video, recognising people and objects and general “stuff” that's going on.
[00:12:25] But that’s not all.
[00:12:27] This is combined with a team of people who are going through the videos and manually checking and assigning tags and categories to each video, so that when the algorithm sees the actions people take on these videos, all that information is stored and can be used to make better recommendations in the future.
[00:12:49] Now to the second reason that this TikTok recommendation algorithm is so good at recommending videos.
[00:12:56] Like every other social network, TikTok’s algorithm relies heavily on machine learning, where an algorithm is trained on large amounts of data. The more input data it has to train on, the better the output, the better the recommendation.
[00:13:14] And this brings us back to the early history of TikTok, and to Musical.ly, which was, you’ll remember, the Chinese app that was very popular in the United States with teenage girls.
[00:13:27] When Musical.ly and Tiktok merged, Tiktok got access to billions of hours of content that it could use to train and improve its algorithm.
[00:13:38] This gave it a huge head start.
[00:13:41] And as more and more content is created on TikTok the better its recommendation algorithm gets, the more time people spend on it, the more videos are created, which in turn improves the recommendation algorithm, and so on..
[00:13:57] Which brings us back to President Trump at the start of the episode.
[00:14:02] By 2020, TikTok had more than 800 million users outside of China, and was drawing the attention of American politicians.
[00:14:12] The advertising, reportedly more than a billion dollars a year, was working, and the app was adding millions of new users every single day.
[00:14:23] Now, why was this problematic, why did it warrant President Trump proclaiming that he was looking at banning the app?
[00:14:32] Well, a few reasons.
[00:14:35] Firstly, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, was Chinese, and–like any large Chinese company–had close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
[00:14:46] TikTok is technically an American company, with data on its American users stored in the US, not in China, but it was a perceived security threat.
[00:14:59] There was the worry of what TikTok would do if it was asked by its parent company, and ultimately asked by the Chinese government, to share personal data on its American users with the Chinese government.
[00:15:13] As you’ve heard, the more you use TikTok, the better it knows you, and so there were security concerns about how this personal data could be used.
[00:15:23] Secondly, it was one thing to have a company like Facebook, now of course “Meta”, but one thing to have an American company like Facebook or Google be powerful and influential, but to have hundreds of millions of Americans opening up a Chinese-made app every day, in an era of increased trade protectionism, well that was a first.
[00:15:48] Thirdly, there were concerns about the impact that TikTok was having on American culture, and society more widely.
[00:15:56] US TikTok users are now spending an average of 80 minutes a day on the app, more than Facebook and Instagram combined, primarily watching videos recommended by an algorithm developed in Beijing.
[00:16:11] Now, what’s wrong with this?
[00:16:13] Perhaps, nothing, it's simply a very efficient algorithm and provides users with relevant and personalised recommendations on the best content for them at any particular time.
[00:16:26] But sceptics have highlighted the potential for this to be used in non-innocent ways.
[00:16:34] For example, if you wanted to reduce the amount of educational content that was available to US teenagers and increase the amount of socially divisive content, well, that can be done with a tweak, a small change, of the algorithm.
[00:16:50] And the dangers of excessive social media use by teenagers is well-known.
[00:16:57] In China, children under the age of 14 are restricted from spending more than 40 minutes a day on Douyin, the Chinese TikTok.
[00:17:08] Outside China, there is no such limit, with many teenagers spending most of their day sucked into the app.
[00:17:17] So, the sceptics ask, why is this app limited in China, but promoted so heavily and without any limits abroad?
[00:17:26] And it’s this that is perhaps most alarming, this almost science-fiction like power of an app to shape culture and society.
[00:17:36] Now, it should be said that TikTok of course is not banned, and since Trump spoke about potentially banning it, it has gone from strength to strength, not just in the United States but all over the world.
[00:17:51] There are almost a billion international TikTok users, and the app has experienced huge success in places with very little cultural similarities to China.
[00:18:01] In the Middle East, for example, TikTok is hugely popular. It’s popular in Indonesia, Brazil, France, Iceland, all over the world.
[00:18:11] And this is the beauty, you could say, of the way in which the recommendation algorithm works. It surpasses, it jumps over cultural norms and traditions.
[00:18:23] All that matters is what you, as a TikTok user, like.
[00:18:29] If you use TikTok, you’ll probably know all too well that the algorithm has an incredible way of showing you videos that you like, no matter your interests.
[00:18:40] If you like fish, “fishtok” has 17 billion views, medieval role playing videos have 4 billion views, and you may well have seen that there is no shortage of English teachers dancing around and teaching you idioms or telling you you need to stop saying “I’m fine”.
[00:19:00] By the way, I think it’s absolutely fine to say “I’m fine”, but of course it’s the controversial viewpoints that get all the attention on TikTok.
[00:19:09] Now, another interesting development, or implication of the way the TikTok recommendation algorithm works, is that it has made it far easier for people to find videos even made by small, relatively unknown people.
[00:19:25] If you compare this to YouTube or Instagram, for example, previously with these apps you would only see content from people you follow, which in many cases would be celebrities or people with large followings.
[00:19:40] With TikTok, because the algorithm is not primarily based on friends or followers, videos can go viral based on merit alone, based on how entertaining they are, which has led to a burst of creativity.
[00:19:56] The TikTok app makes it very easy for anyone to create funny videos using only their phone, so now anyone in the world has the chance of creating something that will be seen by millions of people, you don’t have to be Kim Kardashian.
[00:20:13] And, of course, the easier it is to create videos and be seen by millions of people, the more people create videos, and the more people create videos, the more input data the algorithm has, the better it gets, the more people come back to TikTok, the more people create videos, as you can see it is a virtuous circle.
[00:20:33] And all this leads us back to the present day.
[00:20:37] While Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube were all too happy to take TikTok’s billions of marketing dollars, they have now realised that TikTok has been eating their lunch.
[00:20:49] Every minute spent on TikTok is a minute that can’t be spent on another social network, and in a business where eyeballs and time equal money,
[00:21:00] TikTok has gone from a customer to a competitor, perhaps even, a predator.
[00:21:07] And what this has led to is an increasing TikTok-ization of apps like Facebook and Instagram, where your friends and followers are being deprioritised in favour of algorithmic recommendations.
[00:21:22] If you’re a user of these apps, you’ll probably have seen this already, with “for you” style tabs where you are shown content that the app thinks you will like.
[00:21:33] And, according to most commentators, this is bound to continue because…well, it works.
[00:21:41] Until TikTok, there was very little true innovation in social media apps, the innovation there was was usually swiftly copied by others.
[00:21:51] “Stories” was first a Snapchat development, before it was copied by Instagram and then Facebook.
[00:21:58] Twitter “Spaces” is the same idea as “Clubhouse”, and there are countless other examples.
[00:22:05] The innovation of TikTok was to completely flip the “social” element of social media on its head, and instead approach the problem more as “how can we show you the most entertaining video right now?”
[00:22:20] As it turns out, it doesn’t matter who made the video, they could be your best friend or they could be someone on the other side of the world that you’ve never seen before.
[00:22:31] And this is the real power, you could say the “equalising” power, of TikTok.
[00:22:37] So, to conclude this exploration into this hugely influential app, even if you never download or install TikTok, you will experience the effects of TikTok on culture, society, and on the products and services you use, you’ll see how TikTok has already changed the world, and will continue to change it.
[00:23:00] If you look on the TikTok website, you’ll find the words “ Our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy.”
[00:23:10] Certainly, there is no doubt that it has inspired a vast amount of creativity, and brought joy to billions of people around the world.
[00:23:19] The question remains though, about what unforeseen other things it might have brought with it.
[00:23:28] OK then, that is it for today's episode on TikTok.
[00:23:32] I hope it's been an interesting one, and whether you are an avid TikTok user or you’ve never even seen a TikTok, well, I hope that you've learnt something new.
[00:23:42] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:23:45] Do you use TikTok?
[00:23:47] Do you think it’s a harmless and entertaining app, or it’s something a little bit more nefarious?
[00:23:53] How much control do you think governments should have over the apps and services we use?
[00:23:59] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:24:02] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:24:10] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:24:15] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about an app that is installed on one in four phones across the world, an app that has caught the attention of presidents, and an app that 10 years ago didn't even exist.
[00:00:36] The app is, of course, TikTok.
[00:00:39] Now, unless you have been living under a rock, you will probably have heard of TikTok.
[00:00:44] It’s an incredibly popular app that has gone from nothing to almost two billion users.
[00:00:50] Maybe you’re one of them, maybe you’re not.
[00:00:52] In either case, the story of the growth of TikTok is fascinating.
[00:00:57] So in this episode we’ll look at where it came from, how it exploded, why it is so popular, not just from an emotional point of view but also the technology that makes this possible, and look at how this one app took over the world.
[00:01:14] Let’s get right into it.
[00:01:16] We're looking at TikTok. We may be banning TikTok, we may be doing some other things. There are a couple of options, but a lot of things are happening, so we'll see what happens.
[00:01:26] But we are looking at a lot of alternatives with respect to TikTok.
[00:01:32] That was former president Donald Trump in July of 2020.
[00:01:37] Sure, it might not have been the most eloquent of speeches, but the point is that the President of the United States publicly announced that he was looking at banning TikTok, an app that started out as a way for teenage girls to record themselves singing along to music.
[00:01:55] So, the big question we’ll look at today is…why?
[00:02:00] Now, the first point to address is one that might sound like a simple question.
[00:02:05] What is TikTok?
[00:02:07] Is it a social network?
[00:02:09] Is it a social media app?
[00:02:11] Is it a video sharing platform?
[00:02:14] Is it an entertainment service?
[00:02:17] It’s a hard one to put a label on, but it’s a bit of everything.
[00:02:22] Let me quickly explain how it works from a superficial level, just in case you are not a TikTok user.
[00:02:29] When you open the TikTok app, you are immediately presented with a short video created by another TikTok user.
[00:02:37] The video starts playing right away.
[00:02:40] You can do nothing, and the video will keep playing, and then play again when it gets to the end, you can swipe up, to be shown a new video, you can “like” the video by pressing a heart button, you can comment on it, you can share it, you can bookmark it, etcetera.
[00:02:57] On the surface of it, simple, you might be thinking.
[00:03:01] Based on this description alone, it sounds a little like YouTube or any other video sharing app.
[00:03:09] But as we’ll come to discuss shortly, this design has important consequences, and is a big part of why TikTok has experienced such explosive growth.
[00:03:22] And when it comes to this explosive growth Tik Tok has grown faster than any other app in history.
[00:03:30] You might have heard that TikTok is a Chinese app, but it is actually an interesting mix of Chinese and American, or at least apps that built off success both in China and in the United States.
[00:03:44] So, a brief history.
[00:03:46] The origin of TikTok is an app called Musical.ly, which was built by two Chinese friends in Shanghai back in 2014.
[00:03:56] It was an app that allowed people to create and share short lip-synching videos, videos where people pretended to sing songs at the same time as the music.
[00:04:09] But, Musical.ly never really took off in China, it was never a great success in its home market.
[00:04:17] Instead, it found early traction, initial success, across the Pacific in the United States.
[00:04:25] And specifically, with a market of teenage girls, who absolutely loved it.
[00:04:32] Teenage girls might love to lip-synch, to dance and pretend to sing along with pop songs, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and there are only so many teenage girls in the world.
[00:04:45] In any case, Musical.ly was clearly onto something.
[00:04:50] Back in China, a Beijing-based technology company called ByteDance, was developing its own video-sharing app that was heavily inspired by, some might even say directly copied from, Musical.ly.
[00:05:05] In September of 2016, it launched an app called Douyin, which was available exclusively in China. Within a year, it had 100 million users, and was racking up one billion views of its videos every single day.
[00:05:24] Clearly, it was onto something big, and so it launched an international version of the app, which was made available outside China.
[00:05:34] This app was, of course, TikTok.
[00:05:38] Now, Douyin and TikTok are very similar, but not exactly the same. They look very similar if you just open the app, but Douyin has some more advanced features, such as the ability to buy things directly within the app.
[00:05:56] Anyway, both apps were growing fast - Douyin within China, and TikTok internationally.
[00:06:05] To accelerate its international growth, in 2017 ByteDance bought Musical.ly, this app that was super-successful in the United States with this niche audience of teenage girls.
[00:06:20] The price tag was a reported billion dollars - a lot of money, but it would turn out to be quite the bargain.
[00:06:30] In 2018 the acquisition was complete, and Musical.ly merged with TikTok, becoming one joint app, with the copied app buying the original version it was copied from.
[00:06:44] Over the next few years, TikTok began to advertise heavily in the United States, spending by some estimates hundreds of millions of dollars a month on advertising, trying to hook new users on the app.
[00:07:00] Companies like Facebook and Snapchat were all too happy to accept TikTok’s money. They were getting paid handsomely, and besides, it didn’t seem like a threat - a Chinese app had never had any real success in the United States.
[00:07:16] American culture is unique, it’s not something a foreign app can easily crack, especially an app from a culture as different to the US’s as China’s.
[00:07:27] But there was something that these American technology companies hadn’t understood properly, or at least hadn’t properly appreciated.
[00:07:38] Tiktok was different.
[00:07:40] It didn’t rely on cultural relevance or understanding, it worked in a completely different way.
[00:07:48] And this brings us back to what I hinted at earlier, in terms of the design of the app, how TikTok works on the surface.
[00:07:58] When you think of the other social media apps you might use, think Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, or Twitter, they typically work on a “social graph” basis.
[00:08:11] Going back to the early days of Facebook, you would be friends with people, Facebook would understand that you had a relationship with them, and show you their photos and updates.
[00:08:23] As these products grew and became more advanced, more complexity was added to this.
[00:08:29] You could follow pages of businesses, you could express your interests, Facebook would see who you sent messages to, it bought Instagram, and so on.
[00:08:40] Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat all worked in slightly different ways, but the principle was the same: you create an account, you create connections between people, and you see the content that these people post.
[00:08:56] But the problem here is that this isn’t always what people want to see and engage with.
[00:09:01] You might be Facebook friends with someone you went to university with 15 years ago, or even school 60 years ago, but are you interested in what they are doing now?
[00:09:13] You might have chosen to follow someone on Instagram or Twitter because you’re interested in their tips about making cookies, but do you want to hear their opinion about the World Cup?
[00:09:25] Sometimes, but often the answer is “no”.
[00:09:29] TikTok completely bypassed this, it avoided the question of forming cross-directional relationships between people altogether.
[00:09:39] Yes, you can follow people on TikTok, in the same way as you can on other social networks, but TikTok’s focus is on serving you videos that it thinks you will like, regardless of who made them.
[00:09:53] It’s the quality of the content that matters, not your relationship with the person who created it.
[00:10:00] That’s why, when you open the TikTok app, it opens on a page called “For you”, which could be any kind of video that the app thinks you will enjoy.
[00:10:11] And how does it decide what you will enjoy?
[00:10:14] Well, here’s the clever part.
[00:10:17] On a very superficial level, you can say it’s “the algorithm”, the computer code that decides what you like based on what you have liked before.
[00:10:26] But let’s go several levels deeper, because it’s not just a case of there being an extremely smart set of computer code sitting on a server somewhere.
[00:10:36] We need to talk about two things.
[00:10:39] First, the design of the TikTok app, and how this is different to other social apps.
[00:10:46] Remember, you only ever see one video per screen, so the TikTok algorithm can get a sense of your thoughts about that video based on the actions you take.
[00:10:57] Do you swipe up right away to move onto another video? OK, that indicates it wasn’t interesting.
[00:11:05] Did you watch it all? Good, that’s a promising start.
[00:11:09] Did you watch it all and then tap the heart button? Better, you probably like it.
[00:11:15] Did you watch it all several times, tap the heart button, follow the person who made it, then send it to lots of people and save the video? Boom, I think we’re in business, you clearly like this a lot.
[00:11:28] When you contrast this to the information that an app like Facebook or Twitter gets, where there are often multiple pieces of content on the screen, Facebook and Twitter have more difficulty figuring out what you actually think about something.
[00:11:44] If you scrolled past something, did you just miss it, or were you not interested in it? If you stopped scrolling, which piece of content were you looking at? Did you stop because you agreed or disagreed with that piece of content?
[00:11:59] See, the entire design of TikTok makes it far easier for the algorithm to figure out what you like and don’t like.
[00:12:08] And when it comes to the actual content on TikTok, the videos that users make, the TikTok algorithm is very good at recognising what is in a video, recognising people and objects and general “stuff” that's going on.
[00:12:25] But that’s not all.
[00:12:27] This is combined with a team of people who are going through the videos and manually checking and assigning tags and categories to each video, so that when the algorithm sees the actions people take on these videos, all that information is stored and can be used to make better recommendations in the future.
[00:12:49] Now to the second reason that this TikTok recommendation algorithm is so good at recommending videos.
[00:12:56] Like every other social network, TikTok’s algorithm relies heavily on machine learning, where an algorithm is trained on large amounts of data. The more input data it has to train on, the better the output, the better the recommendation.
[00:13:14] And this brings us back to the early history of TikTok, and to Musical.ly, which was, you’ll remember, the Chinese app that was very popular in the United States with teenage girls.
[00:13:27] When Musical.ly and Tiktok merged, Tiktok got access to billions of hours of content that it could use to train and improve its algorithm.
[00:13:38] This gave it a huge head start.
[00:13:41] And as more and more content is created on TikTok the better its recommendation algorithm gets, the more time people spend on it, the more videos are created, which in turn improves the recommendation algorithm, and so on..
[00:13:57] Which brings us back to President Trump at the start of the episode.
[00:14:02] By 2020, TikTok had more than 800 million users outside of China, and was drawing the attention of American politicians.
[00:14:12] The advertising, reportedly more than a billion dollars a year, was working, and the app was adding millions of new users every single day.
[00:14:23] Now, why was this problematic, why did it warrant President Trump proclaiming that he was looking at banning the app?
[00:14:32] Well, a few reasons.
[00:14:35] Firstly, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, was Chinese, and–like any large Chinese company–had close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
[00:14:46] TikTok is technically an American company, with data on its American users stored in the US, not in China, but it was a perceived security threat.
[00:14:59] There was the worry of what TikTok would do if it was asked by its parent company, and ultimately asked by the Chinese government, to share personal data on its American users with the Chinese government.
[00:15:13] As you’ve heard, the more you use TikTok, the better it knows you, and so there were security concerns about how this personal data could be used.
[00:15:23] Secondly, it was one thing to have a company like Facebook, now of course “Meta”, but one thing to have an American company like Facebook or Google be powerful and influential, but to have hundreds of millions of Americans opening up a Chinese-made app every day, in an era of increased trade protectionism, well that was a first.
[00:15:48] Thirdly, there were concerns about the impact that TikTok was having on American culture, and society more widely.
[00:15:56] US TikTok users are now spending an average of 80 minutes a day on the app, more than Facebook and Instagram combined, primarily watching videos recommended by an algorithm developed in Beijing.
[00:16:11] Now, what’s wrong with this?
[00:16:13] Perhaps, nothing, it's simply a very efficient algorithm and provides users with relevant and personalised recommendations on the best content for them at any particular time.
[00:16:26] But sceptics have highlighted the potential for this to be used in non-innocent ways.
[00:16:34] For example, if you wanted to reduce the amount of educational content that was available to US teenagers and increase the amount of socially divisive content, well, that can be done with a tweak, a small change, of the algorithm.
[00:16:50] And the dangers of excessive social media use by teenagers is well-known.
[00:16:57] In China, children under the age of 14 are restricted from spending more than 40 minutes a day on Douyin, the Chinese TikTok.
[00:17:08] Outside China, there is no such limit, with many teenagers spending most of their day sucked into the app.
[00:17:17] So, the sceptics ask, why is this app limited in China, but promoted so heavily and without any limits abroad?
[00:17:26] And it’s this that is perhaps most alarming, this almost science-fiction like power of an app to shape culture and society.
[00:17:36] Now, it should be said that TikTok of course is not banned, and since Trump spoke about potentially banning it, it has gone from strength to strength, not just in the United States but all over the world.
[00:17:51] There are almost a billion international TikTok users, and the app has experienced huge success in places with very little cultural similarities to China.
[00:18:01] In the Middle East, for example, TikTok is hugely popular. It’s popular in Indonesia, Brazil, France, Iceland, all over the world.
[00:18:11] And this is the beauty, you could say, of the way in which the recommendation algorithm works. It surpasses, it jumps over cultural norms and traditions.
[00:18:23] All that matters is what you, as a TikTok user, like.
[00:18:29] If you use TikTok, you’ll probably know all too well that the algorithm has an incredible way of showing you videos that you like, no matter your interests.
[00:18:40] If you like fish, “fishtok” has 17 billion views, medieval role playing videos have 4 billion views, and you may well have seen that there is no shortage of English teachers dancing around and teaching you idioms or telling you you need to stop saying “I’m fine”.
[00:19:00] By the way, I think it’s absolutely fine to say “I’m fine”, but of course it’s the controversial viewpoints that get all the attention on TikTok.
[00:19:09] Now, another interesting development, or implication of the way the TikTok recommendation algorithm works, is that it has made it far easier for people to find videos even made by small, relatively unknown people.
[00:19:25] If you compare this to YouTube or Instagram, for example, previously with these apps you would only see content from people you follow, which in many cases would be celebrities or people with large followings.
[00:19:40] With TikTok, because the algorithm is not primarily based on friends or followers, videos can go viral based on merit alone, based on how entertaining they are, which has led to a burst of creativity.
[00:19:56] The TikTok app makes it very easy for anyone to create funny videos using only their phone, so now anyone in the world has the chance of creating something that will be seen by millions of people, you don’t have to be Kim Kardashian.
[00:20:13] And, of course, the easier it is to create videos and be seen by millions of people, the more people create videos, and the more people create videos, the more input data the algorithm has, the better it gets, the more people come back to TikTok, the more people create videos, as you can see it is a virtuous circle.
[00:20:33] And all this leads us back to the present day.
[00:20:37] While Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube were all too happy to take TikTok’s billions of marketing dollars, they have now realised that TikTok has been eating their lunch.
[00:20:49] Every minute spent on TikTok is a minute that can’t be spent on another social network, and in a business where eyeballs and time equal money,
[00:21:00] TikTok has gone from a customer to a competitor, perhaps even, a predator.
[00:21:07] And what this has led to is an increasing TikTok-ization of apps like Facebook and Instagram, where your friends and followers are being deprioritised in favour of algorithmic recommendations.
[00:21:22] If you’re a user of these apps, you’ll probably have seen this already, with “for you” style tabs where you are shown content that the app thinks you will like.
[00:21:33] And, according to most commentators, this is bound to continue because…well, it works.
[00:21:41] Until TikTok, there was very little true innovation in social media apps, the innovation there was was usually swiftly copied by others.
[00:21:51] “Stories” was first a Snapchat development, before it was copied by Instagram and then Facebook.
[00:21:58] Twitter “Spaces” is the same idea as “Clubhouse”, and there are countless other examples.
[00:22:05] The innovation of TikTok was to completely flip the “social” element of social media on its head, and instead approach the problem more as “how can we show you the most entertaining video right now?”
[00:22:20] As it turns out, it doesn’t matter who made the video, they could be your best friend or they could be someone on the other side of the world that you’ve never seen before.
[00:22:31] And this is the real power, you could say the “equalising” power, of TikTok.
[00:22:37] So, to conclude this exploration into this hugely influential app, even if you never download or install TikTok, you will experience the effects of TikTok on culture, society, and on the products and services you use, you’ll see how TikTok has already changed the world, and will continue to change it.
[00:23:00] If you look on the TikTok website, you’ll find the words “ Our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy.”
[00:23:10] Certainly, there is no doubt that it has inspired a vast amount of creativity, and brought joy to billions of people around the world.
[00:23:19] The question remains though, about what unforeseen other things it might have brought with it.
[00:23:28] OK then, that is it for today's episode on TikTok.
[00:23:32] I hope it's been an interesting one, and whether you are an avid TikTok user or you’ve never even seen a TikTok, well, I hope that you've learnt something new.
[00:23:42] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:23:45] Do you use TikTok?
[00:23:47] Do you think it’s a harmless and entertaining app, or it’s something a little bit more nefarious?
[00:23:53] How much control do you think governments should have over the apps and services we use?
[00:23:59] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:24:02] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:24:10] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:24:15] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about an app that is installed on one in four phones across the world, an app that has caught the attention of presidents, and an app that 10 years ago didn't even exist.
[00:00:36] The app is, of course, TikTok.
[00:00:39] Now, unless you have been living under a rock, you will probably have heard of TikTok.
[00:00:44] It’s an incredibly popular app that has gone from nothing to almost two billion users.
[00:00:50] Maybe you’re one of them, maybe you’re not.
[00:00:52] In either case, the story of the growth of TikTok is fascinating.
[00:00:57] So in this episode we’ll look at where it came from, how it exploded, why it is so popular, not just from an emotional point of view but also the technology that makes this possible, and look at how this one app took over the world.
[00:01:14] Let’s get right into it.
[00:01:16] We're looking at TikTok. We may be banning TikTok, we may be doing some other things. There are a couple of options, but a lot of things are happening, so we'll see what happens.
[00:01:26] But we are looking at a lot of alternatives with respect to TikTok.
[00:01:32] That was former president Donald Trump in July of 2020.
[00:01:37] Sure, it might not have been the most eloquent of speeches, but the point is that the President of the United States publicly announced that he was looking at banning TikTok, an app that started out as a way for teenage girls to record themselves singing along to music.
[00:01:55] So, the big question we’ll look at today is…why?
[00:02:00] Now, the first point to address is one that might sound like a simple question.
[00:02:05] What is TikTok?
[00:02:07] Is it a social network?
[00:02:09] Is it a social media app?
[00:02:11] Is it a video sharing platform?
[00:02:14] Is it an entertainment service?
[00:02:17] It’s a hard one to put a label on, but it’s a bit of everything.
[00:02:22] Let me quickly explain how it works from a superficial level, just in case you are not a TikTok user.
[00:02:29] When you open the TikTok app, you are immediately presented with a short video created by another TikTok user.
[00:02:37] The video starts playing right away.
[00:02:40] You can do nothing, and the video will keep playing, and then play again when it gets to the end, you can swipe up, to be shown a new video, you can “like” the video by pressing a heart button, you can comment on it, you can share it, you can bookmark it, etcetera.
[00:02:57] On the surface of it, simple, you might be thinking.
[00:03:01] Based on this description alone, it sounds a little like YouTube or any other video sharing app.
[00:03:09] But as we’ll come to discuss shortly, this design has important consequences, and is a big part of why TikTok has experienced such explosive growth.
[00:03:22] And when it comes to this explosive growth Tik Tok has grown faster than any other app in history.
[00:03:30] You might have heard that TikTok is a Chinese app, but it is actually an interesting mix of Chinese and American, or at least apps that built off success both in China and in the United States.
[00:03:44] So, a brief history.
[00:03:46] The origin of TikTok is an app called Musical.ly, which was built by two Chinese friends in Shanghai back in 2014.
[00:03:56] It was an app that allowed people to create and share short lip-synching videos, videos where people pretended to sing songs at the same time as the music.
[00:04:09] But, Musical.ly never really took off in China, it was never a great success in its home market.
[00:04:17] Instead, it found early traction, initial success, across the Pacific in the United States.
[00:04:25] And specifically, with a market of teenage girls, who absolutely loved it.
[00:04:32] Teenage girls might love to lip-synch, to dance and pretend to sing along with pop songs, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and there are only so many teenage girls in the world.
[00:04:45] In any case, Musical.ly was clearly onto something.
[00:04:50] Back in China, a Beijing-based technology company called ByteDance, was developing its own video-sharing app that was heavily inspired by, some might even say directly copied from, Musical.ly.
[00:05:05] In September of 2016, it launched an app called Douyin, which was available exclusively in China. Within a year, it had 100 million users, and was racking up one billion views of its videos every single day.
[00:05:24] Clearly, it was onto something big, and so it launched an international version of the app, which was made available outside China.
[00:05:34] This app was, of course, TikTok.
[00:05:38] Now, Douyin and TikTok are very similar, but not exactly the same. They look very similar if you just open the app, but Douyin has some more advanced features, such as the ability to buy things directly within the app.
[00:05:56] Anyway, both apps were growing fast - Douyin within China, and TikTok internationally.
[00:06:05] To accelerate its international growth, in 2017 ByteDance bought Musical.ly, this app that was super-successful in the United States with this niche audience of teenage girls.
[00:06:20] The price tag was a reported billion dollars - a lot of money, but it would turn out to be quite the bargain.
[00:06:30] In 2018 the acquisition was complete, and Musical.ly merged with TikTok, becoming one joint app, with the copied app buying the original version it was copied from.
[00:06:44] Over the next few years, TikTok began to advertise heavily in the United States, spending by some estimates hundreds of millions of dollars a month on advertising, trying to hook new users on the app.
[00:07:00] Companies like Facebook and Snapchat were all too happy to accept TikTok’s money. They were getting paid handsomely, and besides, it didn’t seem like a threat - a Chinese app had never had any real success in the United States.
[00:07:16] American culture is unique, it’s not something a foreign app can easily crack, especially an app from a culture as different to the US’s as China’s.
[00:07:27] But there was something that these American technology companies hadn’t understood properly, or at least hadn’t properly appreciated.
[00:07:38] Tiktok was different.
[00:07:40] It didn’t rely on cultural relevance or understanding, it worked in a completely different way.
[00:07:48] And this brings us back to what I hinted at earlier, in terms of the design of the app, how TikTok works on the surface.
[00:07:58] When you think of the other social media apps you might use, think Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, or Twitter, they typically work on a “social graph” basis.
[00:08:11] Going back to the early days of Facebook, you would be friends with people, Facebook would understand that you had a relationship with them, and show you their photos and updates.
[00:08:23] As these products grew and became more advanced, more complexity was added to this.
[00:08:29] You could follow pages of businesses, you could express your interests, Facebook would see who you sent messages to, it bought Instagram, and so on.
[00:08:40] Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat all worked in slightly different ways, but the principle was the same: you create an account, you create connections between people, and you see the content that these people post.
[00:08:56] But the problem here is that this isn’t always what people want to see and engage with.
[00:09:01] You might be Facebook friends with someone you went to university with 15 years ago, or even school 60 years ago, but are you interested in what they are doing now?
[00:09:13] You might have chosen to follow someone on Instagram or Twitter because you’re interested in their tips about making cookies, but do you want to hear their opinion about the World Cup?
[00:09:25] Sometimes, but often the answer is “no”.
[00:09:29] TikTok completely bypassed this, it avoided the question of forming cross-directional relationships between people altogether.
[00:09:39] Yes, you can follow people on TikTok, in the same way as you can on other social networks, but TikTok’s focus is on serving you videos that it thinks you will like, regardless of who made them.
[00:09:53] It’s the quality of the content that matters, not your relationship with the person who created it.
[00:10:00] That’s why, when you open the TikTok app, it opens on a page called “For you”, which could be any kind of video that the app thinks you will enjoy.
[00:10:11] And how does it decide what you will enjoy?
[00:10:14] Well, here’s the clever part.
[00:10:17] On a very superficial level, you can say it’s “the algorithm”, the computer code that decides what you like based on what you have liked before.
[00:10:26] But let’s go several levels deeper, because it’s not just a case of there being an extremely smart set of computer code sitting on a server somewhere.
[00:10:36] We need to talk about two things.
[00:10:39] First, the design of the TikTok app, and how this is different to other social apps.
[00:10:46] Remember, you only ever see one video per screen, so the TikTok algorithm can get a sense of your thoughts about that video based on the actions you take.
[00:10:57] Do you swipe up right away to move onto another video? OK, that indicates it wasn’t interesting.
[00:11:05] Did you watch it all? Good, that’s a promising start.
[00:11:09] Did you watch it all and then tap the heart button? Better, you probably like it.
[00:11:15] Did you watch it all several times, tap the heart button, follow the person who made it, then send it to lots of people and save the video? Boom, I think we’re in business, you clearly like this a lot.
[00:11:28] When you contrast this to the information that an app like Facebook or Twitter gets, where there are often multiple pieces of content on the screen, Facebook and Twitter have more difficulty figuring out what you actually think about something.
[00:11:44] If you scrolled past something, did you just miss it, or were you not interested in it? If you stopped scrolling, which piece of content were you looking at? Did you stop because you agreed or disagreed with that piece of content?
[00:11:59] See, the entire design of TikTok makes it far easier for the algorithm to figure out what you like and don’t like.
[00:12:08] And when it comes to the actual content on TikTok, the videos that users make, the TikTok algorithm is very good at recognising what is in a video, recognising people and objects and general “stuff” that's going on.
[00:12:25] But that’s not all.
[00:12:27] This is combined with a team of people who are going through the videos and manually checking and assigning tags and categories to each video, so that when the algorithm sees the actions people take on these videos, all that information is stored and can be used to make better recommendations in the future.
[00:12:49] Now to the second reason that this TikTok recommendation algorithm is so good at recommending videos.
[00:12:56] Like every other social network, TikTok’s algorithm relies heavily on machine learning, where an algorithm is trained on large amounts of data. The more input data it has to train on, the better the output, the better the recommendation.
[00:13:14] And this brings us back to the early history of TikTok, and to Musical.ly, which was, you’ll remember, the Chinese app that was very popular in the United States with teenage girls.
[00:13:27] When Musical.ly and Tiktok merged, Tiktok got access to billions of hours of content that it could use to train and improve its algorithm.
[00:13:38] This gave it a huge head start.
[00:13:41] And as more and more content is created on TikTok the better its recommendation algorithm gets, the more time people spend on it, the more videos are created, which in turn improves the recommendation algorithm, and so on..
[00:13:57] Which brings us back to President Trump at the start of the episode.
[00:14:02] By 2020, TikTok had more than 800 million users outside of China, and was drawing the attention of American politicians.
[00:14:12] The advertising, reportedly more than a billion dollars a year, was working, and the app was adding millions of new users every single day.
[00:14:23] Now, why was this problematic, why did it warrant President Trump proclaiming that he was looking at banning the app?
[00:14:32] Well, a few reasons.
[00:14:35] Firstly, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, was Chinese, and–like any large Chinese company–had close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
[00:14:46] TikTok is technically an American company, with data on its American users stored in the US, not in China, but it was a perceived security threat.
[00:14:59] There was the worry of what TikTok would do if it was asked by its parent company, and ultimately asked by the Chinese government, to share personal data on its American users with the Chinese government.
[00:15:13] As you’ve heard, the more you use TikTok, the better it knows you, and so there were security concerns about how this personal data could be used.
[00:15:23] Secondly, it was one thing to have a company like Facebook, now of course “Meta”, but one thing to have an American company like Facebook or Google be powerful and influential, but to have hundreds of millions of Americans opening up a Chinese-made app every day, in an era of increased trade protectionism, well that was a first.
[00:15:48] Thirdly, there were concerns about the impact that TikTok was having on American culture, and society more widely.
[00:15:56] US TikTok users are now spending an average of 80 minutes a day on the app, more than Facebook and Instagram combined, primarily watching videos recommended by an algorithm developed in Beijing.
[00:16:11] Now, what’s wrong with this?
[00:16:13] Perhaps, nothing, it's simply a very efficient algorithm and provides users with relevant and personalised recommendations on the best content for them at any particular time.
[00:16:26] But sceptics have highlighted the potential for this to be used in non-innocent ways.
[00:16:34] For example, if you wanted to reduce the amount of educational content that was available to US teenagers and increase the amount of socially divisive content, well, that can be done with a tweak, a small change, of the algorithm.
[00:16:50] And the dangers of excessive social media use by teenagers is well-known.
[00:16:57] In China, children under the age of 14 are restricted from spending more than 40 minutes a day on Douyin, the Chinese TikTok.
[00:17:08] Outside China, there is no such limit, with many teenagers spending most of their day sucked into the app.
[00:17:17] So, the sceptics ask, why is this app limited in China, but promoted so heavily and without any limits abroad?
[00:17:26] And it’s this that is perhaps most alarming, this almost science-fiction like power of an app to shape culture and society.
[00:17:36] Now, it should be said that TikTok of course is not banned, and since Trump spoke about potentially banning it, it has gone from strength to strength, not just in the United States but all over the world.
[00:17:51] There are almost a billion international TikTok users, and the app has experienced huge success in places with very little cultural similarities to China.
[00:18:01] In the Middle East, for example, TikTok is hugely popular. It’s popular in Indonesia, Brazil, France, Iceland, all over the world.
[00:18:11] And this is the beauty, you could say, of the way in which the recommendation algorithm works. It surpasses, it jumps over cultural norms and traditions.
[00:18:23] All that matters is what you, as a TikTok user, like.
[00:18:29] If you use TikTok, you’ll probably know all too well that the algorithm has an incredible way of showing you videos that you like, no matter your interests.
[00:18:40] If you like fish, “fishtok” has 17 billion views, medieval role playing videos have 4 billion views, and you may well have seen that there is no shortage of English teachers dancing around and teaching you idioms or telling you you need to stop saying “I’m fine”.
[00:19:00] By the way, I think it’s absolutely fine to say “I’m fine”, but of course it’s the controversial viewpoints that get all the attention on TikTok.
[00:19:09] Now, another interesting development, or implication of the way the TikTok recommendation algorithm works, is that it has made it far easier for people to find videos even made by small, relatively unknown people.
[00:19:25] If you compare this to YouTube or Instagram, for example, previously with these apps you would only see content from people you follow, which in many cases would be celebrities or people with large followings.
[00:19:40] With TikTok, because the algorithm is not primarily based on friends or followers, videos can go viral based on merit alone, based on how entertaining they are, which has led to a burst of creativity.
[00:19:56] The TikTok app makes it very easy for anyone to create funny videos using only their phone, so now anyone in the world has the chance of creating something that will be seen by millions of people, you don’t have to be Kim Kardashian.
[00:20:13] And, of course, the easier it is to create videos and be seen by millions of people, the more people create videos, and the more people create videos, the more input data the algorithm has, the better it gets, the more people come back to TikTok, the more people create videos, as you can see it is a virtuous circle.
[00:20:33] And all this leads us back to the present day.
[00:20:37] While Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube were all too happy to take TikTok’s billions of marketing dollars, they have now realised that TikTok has been eating their lunch.
[00:20:49] Every minute spent on TikTok is a minute that can’t be spent on another social network, and in a business where eyeballs and time equal money,
[00:21:00] TikTok has gone from a customer to a competitor, perhaps even, a predator.
[00:21:07] And what this has led to is an increasing TikTok-ization of apps like Facebook and Instagram, where your friends and followers are being deprioritised in favour of algorithmic recommendations.
[00:21:22] If you’re a user of these apps, you’ll probably have seen this already, with “for you” style tabs where you are shown content that the app thinks you will like.
[00:21:33] And, according to most commentators, this is bound to continue because…well, it works.
[00:21:41] Until TikTok, there was very little true innovation in social media apps, the innovation there was was usually swiftly copied by others.
[00:21:51] “Stories” was first a Snapchat development, before it was copied by Instagram and then Facebook.
[00:21:58] Twitter “Spaces” is the same idea as “Clubhouse”, and there are countless other examples.
[00:22:05] The innovation of TikTok was to completely flip the “social” element of social media on its head, and instead approach the problem more as “how can we show you the most entertaining video right now?”
[00:22:20] As it turns out, it doesn’t matter who made the video, they could be your best friend or they could be someone on the other side of the world that you’ve never seen before.
[00:22:31] And this is the real power, you could say the “equalising” power, of TikTok.
[00:22:37] So, to conclude this exploration into this hugely influential app, even if you never download or install TikTok, you will experience the effects of TikTok on culture, society, and on the products and services you use, you’ll see how TikTok has already changed the world, and will continue to change it.
[00:23:00] If you look on the TikTok website, you’ll find the words “ Our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy.”
[00:23:10] Certainly, there is no doubt that it has inspired a vast amount of creativity, and brought joy to billions of people around the world.
[00:23:19] The question remains though, about what unforeseen other things it might have brought with it.
[00:23:28] OK then, that is it for today's episode on TikTok.
[00:23:32] I hope it's been an interesting one, and whether you are an avid TikTok user or you’ve never even seen a TikTok, well, I hope that you've learnt something new.
[00:23:42] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:23:45] Do you use TikTok?
[00:23:47] Do you think it’s a harmless and entertaining app, or it’s something a little bit more nefarious?
[00:23:53] How much control do you think governments should have over the apps and services we use?
[00:23:59] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:24:02] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:24:10] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:24:15] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
