Trivia / TikTok

• Banned in China: Geopolitical issues with China (including concerns over the Chinese government potentially being able to access the data of foreign users) and issues over the app's content in nations with government-enforced censorship laws have resulted in bans or threats thereof by other countries:
  • The Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology banned TikTok and 58 other apps with Chinese developers or investors (including WeChat, UC Browser and PUBG) in June 2020, citing privacy concerns in response to military conflicts between the two countries in India's Galwan Valley region. The bans were made permanent in January 2021, resulting in the U.S. superseding India as TikTok's largest market in terms of total users.
  • The government of Pakistan banned TikTok in October 2020, citing non-compliance with issues over "immoral" and "indecent" videos on the platform. The ban was reversed in court ten days later, but was reinstated by court order in March 2021.
  • The Taliban government banned TikTok in Afghanistan in April 2022, claiming its content was "misleading the younger generation" and was "not consistent with Islamic laws".
  • While the U.S. federal government as well as several state governments have bans against TikTok on government-issued devices and networks, Montana is seeking to become the first U.S. state to ban the app statewide, but this is planned to be challenged in court by TikTok themselves as well as civil rights groups such as the ACLU.
• Colbert Bump:
  • Many songs from unknown or up-and-coming artists have experienced this after being featured in a viral TikTok video. One of the most clear examples was Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road", which gained exposure through the platform and eventually broke the record for the longest-running #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Other examples include asdfmovie's "The Muffin Song", Pogo's "Living Island", several Jack Stauber songs, and Gayle's "ABCDEFU".
  • Saya Hiyama, a presenter on Japanese weather network WeatherNews (WNI) received this from users outside of Japan (as a result of a viral clip from February 2021, in which she transitioned from happy banter about shogi to a more serious facial expression and vocal tone when reporting on a 4.5-magnitude earthquake that struck the Fukushima region). Users shared clips of Saya from the network's TikTok account, causing her to become a viral sensation on TikTok and YouTube because of her charisma and beauty. Various comments demonstrate this, even comparing with weather reporters from their respective countries.
• Content Warning: Videos containing sensitive material appear with a symbol and warning message indicating some users "may find [it] disturbing," along with blurring the video and the associated screengrab visible on the user's profile. This is easy to bypass by pressing the "Watch Anyway" button below the warning message. Many videos containing dangerous stunts also carry warnings highlighting the safety risks of such acts.
• Dueling Works: TikTok's rise in popularity forced YouTube and Instagram to create their own rival short-form video services, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. It also faces competition from other much smaller, similarly formatted video services such as Triller, Byte and Zynn, none of which has been able to overtake TikTok in popularity and have been outshined even by YouTube and Instagram's platforms (Triller is the only one to have gained any degree of notability, mainly for hosting livestreamed boxing matches and being the home of Timbaland's rap battle series Verzuz).
• Follow the Leader:
  • TikTok's popularity inspired YouTube and Instagram to create their own short-form video platforms, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels; although most of the content uploaded to those services by creators primarily known for TikTok consisted of videos uploaded to the platform, to the extent that Instagram Reels soon implemented protocols to recognize duplicative videos originally uploaded to TikTok. This is on top of other similar U.S.-developed services that came on the scene (such as Byte, Triller and Zynn) as TikTok was gaining popularity with Gen-Zers.
  • TikTok itself has also implemented features borrowed from rival social media apps:
    • In March 2022, TikTok unveiled a Stories feature (similar to that originated on Instagram), in which users can upload segmented videos of up to 15 seconds in length that are visible for 24 hours after their posting. The "story" video is tagged as the first video visible on the user's profile (except where pinned videos are visible, in which case they will appear between the user-pinned videos and their most recently uploaded video).
    • TikTok Now, a feature inspired by the photo sharing app BeReal, was unveiled in September 2022 as both an in-app feature and, in certain countries, as a standalone app. Like BeReal, TikTok Now gives users a daily prompt to take a picture or record a 10-second video on their device's front and back cameras that show friends within their following what they're doing at that given moment.
• No Export for You: Though TikTok and Douyin are almost identical to each other in terms of user interface and other features, content on the respective apps are geographically restricted to the markets where the respective app can be downloaded, meaning TikTok users cannot access content uploaded directly to Douyin and vice versa.

---