TikTok

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TikTok

Instant Stupidity.

Founded:	August 2014 (China, Musical.ly) September 2016 (China, Douyin) August 2, 2018 (Worldwide)
Founder:	Zhang Yiming
Parent:	ByteDance

TikTok (known as Douyin (抖音) in China) is a Chinese video-sharing website founded in 2014. On August 2, 2018, TikTok merged with Musical.ly and was launched worldwide. The site is mainly used for short "comedy", dance, or lip-sync videos.

Despite the popularity of the app among the youth, the site eventually became one of the most despised websites on the Internet, mainly because of its "cringe" nature and content published by users, as well as being a bad influence on children.

Why It Doesn't Make People's Days

Poor moderation: Despite bad behavior plaguing the platform, TikTok does very little to stop it.
- TikTok's moderators ban people or take their videos down for no reason.
- Their community guidelines are just awful.
The community can be rude, annoying, stupid, prejudiced, toxic, or even worse, have a bunch of bigots, and is overall bad.
- To make matters worse, some formerly good TikTokers went downhill in their later years, such as offbrand_square, thasonicshow69, and WantedRaider.
  - Speaking of WantedRaider, he's been known for giving users hate over minor offenses that can easily be forgiven and even making diss edits in order to give users hate like Duchess(a former admin of the original wikis) even to the point where he wants him dead. He also lied about DuchessTheSponge wanting to dox him^[1], when it's not true.
  - ARKZZ is another example of a bad TikToker, he is known for sending Pokemon porn to minors on Discord and he even featured a Pokemon Rule 34 picture in one of his videos and is another bias taker since he thinks "Sonic beats The One Above All from Marvel", even claiming any character he doesn't like is a "fodder" even though that's not what a fodder means, a fodder is actually a type of hay and not a weak character.
    - Doesn't help the fact whenever you criticize them or the people similar to them, they will just tell you to hop on Discord and "debate them" pretty much wasting your time.
- TikTokers have posted about getting abortions and acted proud about it, wasted thousands of dollars in Dogecoins (which is a near worthless cryptocurrency), and pretended to have survived the Holocaust to "educate" viewers about it (but just come across as disrespecting the victims instead), etc.
- Many users are also promoting an extremely bizarre theory that Helen Keller never existed, despite the fact that she is a well-documented figure in history, Their logic is that a person who was both blind and deaf couldn't have possibly done the things she did.
The app collects tons of data without the user's permission, which includes device hardware, other apps on your device, network-related info, your location, etc. It has been speculated that this data gets shipped straight to the Chinese Communist Party. This has led to multiple countries investigating the app, with some like India and Afghanistan banning it under certain circumstances.
- Despite there being a good amount of evidence, TikTok denies this, claiming that they are "baseless accusations".
- If you don't confirm your email address or your phone number, you'll end up constantly getting a popup to keep your account secure every 3 days.
Because of the nature of the videos, many of them can damage peoples' attention spans, especially under-aged kids who are still growing up.
- Not just that, it can be a bad influence on them as it can encourage them to have a toxic mindset and give them no reason to stop using the app.
While the duet mode sounds good on paper, it introduces more problems with the community as mentioned above, like harassment and cashing in on other users' videos. This is even worse especially when the used video is by an obscure user and the influencer does not give any attributions to him.
A lot of annoying, repetitive, and awful music remixes and mashups come from here. For example, any timeless classic or popular song/media we all know and love is butchered by most TikTokers, with grating autotune, generic rap and hip-hop trap beats, and stupid parodied lyrics meddling to an obnoxious, abysmal degree.
- One example is "Astronaut in the Ocean" by Masked Wolf in which he talks about mental depression and anxiety. The song was used on the site, but the message was obscured by the trend to the point that all users know about the song is the intro.
- Because of that, TikTok has been described as "a music spoiler" where even if it gives the artist fame, it gives them a fanbase that doesn't take their music seriously.
The influencers on this platform are even worse than the users. Not only are they cringy, talentless, and unfunny, but they're also very manipulative towards their fanbases and come off as mean-spirited assholes who get into drama frequently.
- Sometimes they even get into legal trouble, but get away with it because of their young age and defensive fanbase.
Because they're owned by a Chinese company, there is a ton of propaganda praising the Communist Party of China (CCP) and the Chinese government.
- A user who made a video to bring awareness to the ongoing Uyghur genocide was banned from the platform for "hate speech".
The Text-to-Speech voices in almost every video are grating and can get very annoying to listen to.
Mobile pandering: For some reason, you can't view your profile picture on a computer, so you need a mobile device to view your profile picture on TikTok.
There are several idiotic, mindless, and dangerous "challenges" and trends on this site that no one (especially young kids) should try to imitate. It is even worse than the ones that originated on other social networks:
- The #CoronavirusChallenge involves people licking public toilets. Not only is it bilious and extremely gross, but it can also lead to you actually getting COVID-19 as the name implies along with other illnesses.
- The #AutismChallenge encourages users to make fun of autistic people, which is extremely rude, offensive, and insulting.
- The #NewTeacherChallenge involves a parent sending a photo of a disabled person (as their child's new teacher) to their child, which will cause that child to react negatively (normally by crying or acting out of fear). Not only does it offend disabled people, but it is also fear-mongering.
- The #GeorgeFloydChallenge involves users kneeling on their friend's neck in a manner similar to how George Floyd was killed, which can not only be considered very bigoted and racist, but also disrespectful to Floyd and his relatives.
- The #SkullbreakerChallenge involves three people standing next to one another in a line. When the person in the middle jumps in the air, the people on either side kick out the legs of the middle person. This challenge led to people being hospitalized and allegedly some even dying.
- The Blackout Challenge involves users choking themselves until they lose consciousness, which is extremely dangerous and life-threatening. A 10-year-old girl named Nyla Anderson died imitating this challenge, leading her mother to sue TikTok.
- The infamous Tide Pod Challenge involves people eating the laundry detergent pods whole. Do they not realize how poisonous those pods are to the human body? You could even die if the ingredients inside those pods get digested!
- The Outlet Challenge involves people inserting a penny onto a tilted plug's partially exposed prongs which would cause the outlet to spark, possibly frying the wiring or even causing a fire. This happened to a school in Westford, Massachusetts, with the school's breakers and wiring being damaged and the student responsible for receiving charges.
- There's a really stupid challenge about dancing on graves, which is absolutely disrespectful to the dead.
- DeviousLicks involves stealing and vandalizing school property. The trend has resulted in the suspensions, expulsions, and even arrests of many students across the United States.
- The #SchoolShootingChallenge, probably one of the worst ones yet, actually encourages teens to go out and commit a mass shooting at their school or make threats about committing one "just for laughs". This shows they don't care about other people and do this for the sake of scoring popularity points. Not only that, but some of these people also actively support gun control, and yet here they are, making threats about committing mass shootings.
- The #BenadrylChallenge consists of taking 12 to 14 pills of the over-the-counter drug in hopes of hallucinating. Because of this, a 13-year-old died after taking this deadly challenge.^[2]
- A 19-year-old posted a video of himself committing suicide. Instead of alerting the police immediately, the staff instead dealt with their PR to make sure they didn't receive backlash.^[3] It took them about three hours until they finally contacted the police.
- A 4-year-old girl in the Philippines almost lost her life after trying to hang herself while copying one of the alleged video challenges.^[4]^[5]
- Debate/power scaling videos (a type of video that originated from the site) used to be really fun to make when it was like a meme character vs an anime character where people are being satire but nowadays, they went downhill after people now take things seriously. Thankfully, these videos are still in their good form on YouTube Shorts.
On the mobile website, it forces you to install the app after browsing a certain amount of videos, which is extremely frustrating given how much criticism the website received.
The app can consume high battery power, especially on Samsung devices.
This platform has a negative yet oblivious impact on the Internet, as many people tried to replicate its popularity and made them change for the worse.
- Some companies even started hiring their influencers for roles in web series and movies, which does not do well and gets a lot of negative reception due to the influencers being despised figures outside of TikTok.
Like YouTube, this platform is vulnerable to inappropriate mobile game ads that show up every time you watch 3-4 videos.
TikTok mutes videos for no reason which makes them boring to watch unless you have watched them before they were unmuted. Thankfully if you download muted videos, you can still hear the sound.
Speaking of sounds, the platform tends to block sounds in most countries because they contain profane titles and you aren't allowed to use them. One example is Doja Cat's song "D**K".
The platform's name is unoriginal. The creators literally just copied one of Ke$ha's songs as a name and just removed the space and made both Ks lowercase. Because of that, you have to be specific, as you must write her name after typing in "tik tok" in order to get the music video as a result.
There are a bunch of unfunny videos like, the parents mistreating and neglectful the middle child badly.
Some videos have sound credit errors, as they usually display that the sound is the original content of the user, even if said audio clip is available in the sound library.
Unlike on YouTube, you can't edit your comment. Once you uploaded it, the only way to change it is to delete it and type it again
There are numerous controversial TikTokers, one of the most recent examples being Mizzy, who entered a stranger's home without permission. He committed even more heinous crimes, including stealing a woman's dog, ripping up library books, and climbing into others' cars. Fortunately, he was caught violating a court order by releasing additional videos online.^[6]

Redeeming Qualities

The app has popularized trends like "Hit or Miss" (based on the iLOVEFRiDAY's diss track on Mia Khalifa), "I'm Already Tracer", "Rockefeller Street", Food trends, Ratatouille the Musical, Funny JoJo Siwa Parodies, etc.
- TikTok has even helped revive older songs such as "Dreams" by Fleetwood Mac, which was a number one hit in 1977. Forty-three years later, the song re-entered the Top 20 of the Hot 100.
Making videos and using in-app features to edit videos is quite easy compared to other video-sharing websites.
Some of the worst users like That Vegan Teacher have been banned from the site. GeminiOfficial was also banned after it was revealed he was a pedophile.
The idea of TikTok was fine; however, it was ruined by its poor execution.
They have thankfully cracked down on certain trends that had bad impacts such as the aforementioned devious licks. They began removing videos featuring the trend, and the trend was later banned for violating TikTok's Community Guidelines against illegal activities. Searching for related hashtags results in a message about TikTok's Community Guidelines.
Some of the videos on the platform can be funny or interesting.
While most TikTokers are bad, we have a ton of iconic and friendly TikTokers:
1. Ronald Williams (until his death in March 2021)
2. SeanDoesMagic
3. DonaldDucc
4. Papa Gut
5. Charlesmallet
6. logan.toth
7. Gordon Ramsay (despite being already popular)
8. Nick DiGiovanni
9. Khaby Lame
10. Kingzippy
11. Howieazy
12. SandTagious
13. Sonn1c
14. Taleeasmr
15. Wooppuup
16. Createhues
17. Sosatisfying
18. Chikn.Nuggit
19. monkeman317
20. WyattzWorld
21. sticksy617
22. offbrand_square (before mid-2020)
23. max_lives
24. sloppyandsunshine
25. _Neon46
26. Darren Espanto (despite being already popular since 2014)
27. 1980sGamer
Some good songs have TikTok to thank for becoming popular, if through what could be seen as dumb "dances".
Some good artists have become popular with TikTok, such as Ashnikko or Boywithuke.
TikTok can be a fun place as long as it's used responsibly.

Trivia

TikTok was completely banned in India along with several other apps like WeChat, UC Browser, and Player's Unknown Battlegrounds (PUBG) on June 29, 2020. An agency called the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology released a statement saying the apps were "prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order". The ban was made permanent in January 2021. In response to the ban, TikTok argued that it will be forced to lay off over 2,000 employees in India.
This site is known for having a user base with age diversity.
The Montana lawmakers approved the ban on TikTok, making it the first state to ban TikTok.^[7]