I’ve been noting a lot of blow-back related to the ‘Coming Soon’ ban of TikTok in the United States, and after writing, ‘Beyond TikTok *Maybe* Being Banned‘, I found myself wondering… why are people so attached to a social network?

I could get into the obvious reasons – the sunk cost fallacy, where so much time and energy is invested in something that one doesn’t want to leave it. We humans tend toward that despite knowing better.

We see this with all social media where one can’t simply move content from one place to another easily, much less the connections made. If you back up your Facebook account, as an example, it’s only your information that gets backed up – not all the interactions with everyone you know, and not content you may be tagged in. So you lose that, but it’s sort of like moving to different geography – you can’t always keep relationships with those tied to your previous geography.

Yet the vehemence of some of the posts in defense of TikTok had me digging deeper. It wasn’t just the sunken cost, there was more to it than that. I haven’t used TikTok, not because of some grand reason – I just didn’t find it appealing.

Thus I explored some things. I’m not really for or against TikTok. I am against social media that passes your information on to entities you may not know, where it will be used in ways that are well beyond your control – even anonymized, it doesn’t mean an individual isn’t identifiable. How many times have you pictured a face and not remembered a name? Still, there’s something really sticky about TikTok.

Here’s what I found.

The Start: The Death of Vine.

When Vine curled up and died as Twitter started allowing video uploads, TikTok stood in. Vine was used by a diverse group of people – the regular stuff, including marketing and branding. There was nothing too different about users of other social media at that point.

It’s appealing to those with short attention spans, and the new average attention span is 47 seconds.

Then Ferguson happened, and Vine ended up becoming a part of an identifiable social movement after Michael Brown was shot and killed, largely because of Antonio French’s (then St Louis City Alderman) posts documenting racial tensions in and around Ferguson.

#FERGUSON, a short film composed of my Vines and videos from August 2014 https://t.co/0AHL8wmUJA

— Antonio French (@AntonioFrench) August 9, 2016

It connected people who were participating in protests, which happens to an extent in some social media, but it doesn’t seem as much. It makes sense. A short video on a mobile phone drains less of the battery and the context of protests is hard to miss in a short video format – so while documenting things, one is more mobile, can post more information in context, and can be seen by a lot of people. That’s a powerful tool for social commentary and social awareness.

It made such an impact that activists mourned the loss of Vine.

TikTok showed up, with recommendation algorithms.

The Vine Replacement.

TikTok has the regular band of social media users, from dancing to brands – but it filled a vacuum left behind for social awareness and protest. It had other ‘benefits’ – being able to use copyrighted music on that platform but not others allowed lip synching and dance for a new generation of social media users. You can ‘stitch’ other videos – combining someone else’s video for yours, allowing commentary on commentary, like a threaded conversation only with combined contexts¹.

There’s a lot of commentary on it’s algorithm for giving people want to see as well.

Certain landmark things happened in the world that highlighted social awareness and activism.

Black Lives Matter

• From TikTok to Black Lives Matter, how Gen Z is revolutionizing activism, which also shows context of Syria being bombed.
• TikTok apologizes after being accused of censoring #BlackLivesMatter posts: A hiccough in an algorithm caused #BlackLivesMatter and #GeorgeFloyd tags to show zero views.

Russian Invasion of Ukraine

• Watching the World’s “First TikTok War”
• Ukraine war: How TikTok fakes pushed Russian lies to millions
• TikTok was ‘just a dancing app’. Then the Ukraine war started
• TikTok users in Russia can see only old Russian-made content

Israel-Hamas War.

• Israel Has Asked Meta And TikTok To Remove 8,000 Posts Related To Hamas War: 26% of the 9,500 requests were for TikTok to remove content.
• How the Israel-Hamas War Has Roiled TikTok Internally: (may be paywalled) The internal struggles in the offices of TikTok over the war and bias toward the Palestinians – a subject of further examination in links below.
• “Israel is losing the war on TikTok. Palestinians have been more active for many, many years“
• Playful Activism: Memetic Performances of Palestinian Resistance in TikTok #Challenges: A well cited paper.

Plenty of other platforms were used in these, but the younger generations on the planet gravitated to TikTok. It became a platform where they could air their own contexts and promote awareness of things that they care about, though not all of minorities may agree, with one large blind spot.

The Blind Spot

That blind spot accounts for 18.6% of the global population. China. There is no criticism of China on TikTok, it’s removed, and maybe because people are caught up in their own contexts they seem unaware of that, and the state of human rights in China. It’s a platform where you can protest and air dirty laundry except in the country it is headquartered in.

It should be at least a little awkward to use a platform for social activism headquartered in a country that doesn’t permit it, much less the country that sits at 3rd in the list Worst countries for human rights and rule of law as of 2022, below Yemen and Iran.

The Great Firewall of China absolves users of TikTok of ignorance by assuring their ignorance.

And interesting, of the 30+ countries that have banned TikTok, China’s one of them. The localized version, Douyin, is subject to censorship by the Chinese Communist Party.

I’d say that should make everyone a little leery about supporting TikTok.

But What Will Come Next?

The TikTok platform certainly has allowed the younger generations to give voice to their situations and issues. That is not a bad thing.

There’s a few things that are happening – TikTok won’t go away for a while, it will be in court more than likely for some years appealing the ban. If people do care about social awareness and activism, it’s a hard case to make that what’s good for the rest of the world isn’t good for China.

If you truly care about human rights, TikTok is a paradox. It’s hard to have a conscientious conversation about human rights on a platform which doesn’t practice those same rights in it’s own country.

The key to finding an alternative is an algorithm, since the algorithm is fed by tracking users – users who might not be as keen about being tracked when they understand what that means.

Something will come. Something always does.

1. This has seen some sociological study as you can see in “Stitching the Social World: The Processing of Multiple Social Structures in Communication” ↩︎