Kareem Rahma posting scenes in Minneapolis to the tune of Post Malone’s remix of Childish Gambino’s This Is America became a key cultural moment for young users desperate for change in the US and beyond.įew will remember that in the first few days following George Floyd’s death, the #GeorgeFloyd and #BlackLivesMatter pages had 0 views due to a "technical glitch". History will probably come to remember TikTok as having a prominent role in Black Lives Matter, promoting it as a trend on its Discover page and winning the hashtag more than 23 billion views. If Instagram gave us the IG model, TikTok's given us our talented next-door neighbour, and with the help of its algorithm, here is how these characters changed 2020 – and could well change the years to come. TikTok may have managed to draft in celebrities like chef Gordon Ramsay, but users flood the app to see distinctly ordinary and relatable individuals.
The ordinary folk who have become known faces have hastened in a new era of content creator gone are the pastel pink hyper-edits and Photoshopped goddesses of the Instagram yesteryear. It came from being myself – and that's consistently what other creators say too. I'd love to be able to say that my scintillating journalism used to deliver me the same effect, but the fact that anyone knows my face is testament to how well TikTok has had people glued to their screens this year. Having a substantial following on TikTok translates to a strange sort of celebrity in 2020 I only have 140,000 followers, which is pretty small in the grand scheme of the internet, yet I now can't go a fortnight without being recognised in the street. There is a space for everyone on there – the good, the bad and the plain bizarre. That means that in one session, you could consume reams and reams of engaging videos – familiarising yourself with creators, trends and communities in the process. Following on from the era of the YouTube wormhole, TikTok’s algorithm recommends you the content you subconsciously crave – but unlike YouTube, these videos are under a minute long. Asking questions, supporting worthy initiatives and mass-protesting in an app space is something that comes naturally to these digital natives. Encountering somebody online that you relate to before following them religiously, DM-ing them and inundating them with supportive comments and queries whenever they post is distinctly Zoomer (Gen Z) culture. Just as being a boomer isn’t necessarily about belonging to an age demographic, but a rather a mindset, there's no age threshold for TikTok it's more a willingness to hurl yourself into the chaos of the internet. I am technically too old for TikTok, sitting just outside its core 13-24-year-old market. The Zoom horror that was 2020’s most timely hit The street art that expressed the world’s pain
Now, at the end of 2020, TikTok is the most downloaded app of the year – and it's changed an awful lot more than just how we consume media online. But while the grown-ups were busy trying to work out the implications of national security threats from the Chinese Communist Party and a bifurcated US/China internet, teenagers were nurturing the most powerful tool they had ever seen. It popularised short-form video and developed a recommendation algorithm that made it one of the world’s strongest video competitors.
The first major social media app to be run beyond the purview of Silicon Valley, the Chinese-owned platform joined the likes of WhatsApp, Instagram and Twitter in the social media diets of many, despite a multitude of controversies. With stories about an algorithm that suppressed "ugly and poor creators" and President Donald Trump considering a US ban, TikTok was at once the most beguiling and maligned app of the year.
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