A lot has changed over the past six years. Seemingly every large media company now has a streaming service. An entire global pandemic happened, and continues to happen. We switched presidents, and then switched back. But one of the most transformative forces to arrive in that time, in the category of How We Live Now, is TikTok.
Although it first launched in 2016, TikTok only entered the U.S. market in 2018, after Beijing-based parent company ByteDance merged it with lip sync app Musical.ly, which had an office in California. It did not take long for TikTok to become the most downloaded app in the world, and remain so for years, until Instagram overtook it in 2023. That was the same year the Biden administration first attempted to regulate the app, claiming it poses a threat to national security. Now that those regulatory efforts have culminated in a full U.S. ban starting January 19, it’s worth noting the many ways that TikTok rocked U.S. culture in a relatively short time.
TikTok made video reign supreme on social media
Before TikTok, video was far less dominant on social media. It was on the menu, to be sure, but generally not as the main course. TikTok changed all that.
By allowing for videos well beyond Vine’s looping six seconds or the one-minute limit then on Instagram, providing sophisticated in-app editing tools to make more polished content, and vastly improving discoverability, it expanded the horizons of social video. With more space and more possibilities, TikTok content quickly evolved beyond the ephemeral creativity that came before it, and viewers couldn’t get enough. For live performers of all stripes, a TikTok presence soon became mandatory. For those whose medium was film or TV, short clips from longer shows like Hot Ones went far on the platform, helping turn it into a marketing powerhouse.
It shortened America’s attention span
Once TikTok kicked in the doors on short-form social video, its competitors barged in as well. Instagram rolled out Reels in August 2020, and YouTube followed suit with Shorts one month later. The thirst for short video content has since migrated beyond social and into the New York Times DNA, where many op-eds now come with a video component.
Short social video has now gotten so popular, it’s raised questions about literacy among the Gen Alpha users growing up with it. (Not that TikTok discourages reading altogether. The community of creators and users known as BookTok has helped forge numerous bestsellers.)
TikTok may not make grownups forget how to read, but it might be affecting their ability or desire to focus for long stretches. TikTok’s signature promise of endless uniquely compelling content a finger-swipe away—thanks to its famously mysterious, almighty algorithm—appears to have shortened America’s collective attention span. The Wall Street Journal coined the term TikTok Brain to describe the platform’s effect on kids’ concentration, but plenty of video-addled adults are also now similarly hooked on the dopamine hits TikTok doles out.
It created a world of possibilities for micro-niche influencers
TikTok’s algorithm is almost telepathically attuned to its users’ interests. Some who swear by it claim the platform knows them better than they know themselves. Because of its ability to surface all manner of pleasing content, TikTok has led many of its users to niche areas they might never have come across otherwise. If the user responds with a heart tap, the algorithm rewards them by delivering more of that content again and again. The intense specificity of TikTok’s For You Page has allowed influencers in micro niches to build followings and thrive.
Every now and then, people tend to casually mention in conversation something they saw on Book Binding TikTok, or Vegan Mimicry TikTok or Fragrance TikTok. Never doubt that such places exist. The reason vibrant communities have sprung up around them, though, is because TikTok has helped its more-than-a-billion active users hear the signal within the noise.
“On Instagram, my content finds the wrong people first, and then it might find the right people; and on YouTube, it finds no one,” plus-size influencer ItsLindss told her 273k TikTok followers in a recent video. “And then here, my content has always found the right people first.”
TikTok made it easier than ever to be a trendsetter
Participatory social media did not arrive with TikTok. The Harlem Shake phenomenon and the Ice Bucket Challenge both commandeered Twitter screens in 2014, followed by the Mannequin Challenge a couple years later, and several other trends in the years to come. What changed with TikTok, however, is that these challenges and trends started coming fast and furiously.
On any given day for the past four years or so, TikTok could potentially be overrun by sea shanties or the Wednesday dance or girl dinner or hot girl walks or the clean girl aesthetic. (A great deal of TikTok trends happen to have “girl” in their titles.)
Beyond assigning challenges and coining new phrases, TikTok virality also frequently follows certain recipes and products. It creates heightened demand around feta cheese one moment, and around Stanley Cups the next. This is a dream come true for marketers—or at least it would be if users weren’t generally adept at sniffing out inauthentic enthusiasm, and shunning it.
Even if TikTok does indeed end up fully banned, expect plenty of people to continue hard-launching catchphrases, dances, and recipes elsewhere.
It remade the music industry in its image
The music business has gotten a whole lot TikTok-ier in the past five years. Many musicians now hope to mimic the early TikTok success of Doja Cat’s “Say So,” which spawned a bespoke dance challenge back in 2019. Their labels do more than hope. Some of them apparently demand those artists spend time on the platform, creating opportunities for their music to go viral. (The deep sigh Florence Welch lets out before launching into song in this 2021 TikTok suggests she might have filmed the video at gunpoint.) When artists like Meghan Trainor, who reportedly has a “TikTok sherpa,” do embrace the platform, though, it can help them achieve ubiquity.
But TikTok is more to the music world than a vehicle for virality or a means of surfacing artists like PinkPantheress who have conquered the platform. It also honed a style of music that gels with its algorithm—short songs with loopable sections suited to dance choreography. Charli XCX was once among the artists in 2021 slyly complaining about having to create TikTok moments; then in 2024, her 2:31-second song “Apple” inspired perhaps the year’s definitive TikTok dance.
Though the app helped hype up movies and TV shows too, it didn’t have nearly as massive an impact on the industries around them as it did on the music business. If anything, TikTok cemented short-form video content as those industries’ primary competition.
Whether the app is ultimately saved by some cinematic deux ex machina, TikTok has already altered not just how we consume news and entertainment, but how we see and hear the world.
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