The explosion of TikTok

Trends, dances, cuisine, curious facts, fashion, funny videos, information: the TikTok is a content universe, in which we can find everything and a little more. The most famous social network at the moment is an entertainment machine, which has the power to make and break careers. In this article, you will learn more about the platform and the the reason for your success.

TikTok is a social network that consists of sharing of short videos, by a norm of 15 seconds, but, at most, 3 minutes. The platform, which was already widely known, saw a explosion in your number of active users during the pandemic. In 2020, according to data from Sensor Tower, a social network gained more than 750 million active users, which represented a 85% growth in relation to the previous year and which caused the total number of active users to exceed the threshold of billions.

Since then, TikTok has become a craze, having been consecutively the most downloaded app in the world in 2020, 2021, and 2022, with more than by the end of 2021 already three billion downloads. There are several reasons why the platform has become so popular. First of all, TikTok is extremely easy to use, allowing the user to create and share videos in just a few minutes - an aspect that has been increasingly developed by the company, which launched in 2020 the CapCut, a "brother" of TikTok, focusing on video editing. On the other hand, the platform ends up becoming quite addictive, due to the quick and easy-to-watch content, with a plethora of videos on various themes.

TikTok has revolutionized the social media industry. Beyond abandoning the traditional text and image format of its competitors, the social network also has a different way of presenting content. While on Instagram or Facebook, it is necessary to follow friends and celebrities to see their content, on TikTok you just need to enter the app to come across the For You Page ("For You"), an updated feed with new and diverse content, specially selected and from custom shape for the user. 

"Its innovation has made it increasingly common for other social networks to copy TikTok, with the introduction of tools that are the same or similar to those of the platform, as is the case with" Instagram Reels, of the YouTube Shorts or even from the "For You" page, of Twitter. 

Another aspect that made TikTok so relevant was its viral strand. There is a vast amount of content on the platform that ends up being shared on other social networks, but more than that, on TikTok it is possible to be taken to stardom with just one video successful on the platform. Currently, the success of a song can be easily measured by their performance on social media and new artists are discovered and raised to fame with just one viral song. An example of this is Gayle, an American singer who, despite having no prior relevance in the music scene, became globally known due to the success of her song “ABCDEFU” on TikTok.

Despite its success, TikTok is a platform that causes some controversy, especially in the United States of America. In 2020, when its number of users exploded, the U.S. government, then led by Donald Trump, expressed concerns about national security regarding the platform, as it is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese private company. Despite there being no evidence of any kind, and even though TikTok does not operate in China, the American executive feared that the company was share user data with the Chinese government.

In August of that same year, the United States government issued an executive order that banned TikTok in the country, unless ByteDance sold control of the platform to a national company. This order would eventually be suspended in October 2020, after a federal judge's injunction. At the time, the company had already agreed to sell a majority stake in TikTok to Oracle and Walmart.

"Recently, at the beginning of this year, the Biden administration reignited the flame of this controversy, with the same demands as the previous government. This led to the CEO of TikTok," Shou Zi Chew, had to give explanations about the social network before Congress of the United States. The ban on the platform on American soil is unpopular among the population, as nearly half of the country (approximately 150 million people) uses the social network and it has been an essential platform for the promotion of small businesses.