The Dark Side of TikTok

TikTok, the app everyone is talking about right now, has grown at an astronomical rate.

TikTok. We’ve all interacted with the app at least once, whether it be personal use, word of mouth or advertisements. I’m sure you’re aware of the rapid growth of this Chinese platform, breaking into Silicon Valley and overtaking every other social media superpower to become the forum for youngsters around the world. But is TikTok becoming too big? Has it suddenly evolved into this giant, dangerous app under ByteDance?

Musical.ly was launched in July 2014 by friends Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang in Shanghai, China. The idea started with Alex’s epiphany on a train. On this train, he saw a group of teenagers. His vision was to draw ideas from this sample group of teenagers and take over the American and global teenage world. He observed that they were doing two main things: Listening to music, and taking photos and videos. And that’s how Musical.ly originated, a combination of the two, making it easy for users to create music themed videos.

Due to their small team, Zhu decided that he would target the US market. The app quickly gained loyal users, and in 2015 skyrocketed into a social media superpower, securing millions of new creators and climbing to the No.1 spot on the IOS App Store.

Suddenly, Musical.ly was the most popular app in the world, and money-making opportunities opened up left right and centre for the company. Campaigns and brand deals were coming together including Coca Cola’s #ShareACoke campaign, the first of many promotion and advertisement hashtags used to promote a certain cause or company through videos. Famous musicians and celebrities were joining the app, such as Jason Derulo, one of Musical.ly’s earliest celebrities. Musical.ly was making it easy for celebrities and influencers to make money on their app, whether it be through promotions, monetisation or TikTok actually paying the really popular ones to post videos, something Vine failed to do, leading to its downfall.

Musical.ly was tearing it up in the US, however they needed something more. They needed a little push, help from one of China’s biggest technology companies to take over the social media market and grow into the giant that it is today. That came in the 2017 acquiring of Musical.ly by ByteDance for around $800 million. It was then rebranded as TikTok, a bigger, better, evolved version of Musical.ly with more features, video editing tools, songs and sections. For example, now editing, filtering and creating was so much easier. You could basically create short, YouTube style edited videos on TikTok.

New ByteDance company TikTok was growing at an astronomical rate. By 2021, TikTok had 15-20 million daily users on Google Play and the App Store each, and had over 700 million monthly users. TikTok seemed like the place to be, and was overtaking every other social media setup in terms of popularity including YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat etc. Musicians would go to TikTok to promote their music and put it in videos, and that TikTok community had the power of increasing the popularity of an unknown song drastically and bringing new artists’ names to light. All kinds of celebrities and brands would come on there to promote their events and products and most importantly, ordinary people from all around the world would make videos to the songs they love and gain popularity on this app. It is important to mention the intense marketing that ByteDance used to promote the new TikTok. They would go to all kinds of websites, apps, mobile games and services and put their ads there to spread the word. TikTok was well and truly everywhere. I remember downloading a few mobile games a couple years ago, and in every 5 second ad break that would pop up on those games, it would be a TikTok ad.

It was like the heir to YouTube’s throne as the king of video streaming services, and it seemed like TikTok users would spend much more time on the app than anyone would on YouTube.

This was thanks to the For You Page, and endless page of videos recommended to you based on your preferences. You could scroll down your For You Page forever, and the algorithm would generate videos that you would like based on your history and preferences. And this endless scrolling is what makes addiction on TikTok such a problem, and one of the reasons why it is so massive and dangerous.

I’m speaking from personal experience. I am a TikTok user, and I downloaded the app last year after constant recommendation from friends. Personally, I am a big fan of sports, in particular football, stereotypical comedy videos, hip hop and basketball. As I used the app more and let the algorithm know that these were my preferences, I started to see all kinds of amusing videos on these genres pop up on my for you page. I would sit there, scrolling for hours and interacting with all these posts, every one guaranteed to relate to me in some way or amuse me. And I found myself spending more and more time on the app. It got to a point where I would spend 4 hours every day just scrolling through TikTok, and I realised that I was going down a bad path. I set a screen limit on TikTok for half an hour every day to limit my usage of the app and prevent an addiction.

However, not everyone in my position would be unwilling to just give up to TikTok and its extremely addictive algorithm, and making TikTok the centre of your life can cause mental health problems and depression. It is a seriously bitter reality, but the bliss of interacting with things you like and videos that amuse you can cause serious addiction and mental health problems including discovery of a dark side of TikTok, one that mocks racial, mental and physical issues and use of the app to engage in illegal activity, which leads me onto my next point.

There is a seriously dark side of TikTok, hidden behind the feel-good factor and joy of the algorithm. Part of the problem is what happens to underage children on TikTok and the fact that there is not enough cut-down on the amount of underage people on the app or at least protection of them.

There have been many cases on TikTok of underage children experiencing sexual misconduct through the app, such as receiving from and posting inappropriate videos to grown men, resharing and location sending.

There have also been many cases of various hashtags, sounds and accounts used to bully and/or mock diseases or issues, such as eating disorders, mental health or races. And unfortunately these videos and comments are easily visible to everyone, and aren’t being taken down or deleted despite various reports.

There have also been reports of terrorist groups such as ISIS posting propaganda on the app.

So we now have to ask the question: are TikTok doing enough to tackle the dark side of their app. There have been many complaints by people, even celebrities, made publicly to talk about their experience with using TikTok’s reporting system. For example, reporting racist comments and TikTok’s automatic system deciding not to take them down. And are they doing enough to take down accounts that partake in obscene and illegal activity on their app? Definitely not. It seems that they are lost in all the money, fame and growth of the service and are not doing enough to tackle injustice and obscene behaviour on their app.

And this is why with their growth, TikTok have become equally as dangerous too. It seems that the app that teenagers are spending hours a day on has no barrier between kids and access to a dark, indecent side of the app. And the addiction minefield that the algorithm has set could really be pulling teenagers into a terrifying place. It seems that it is not all fun, music and dances for TikTok users, and the app could really be going down a dark path.