Ryan Broderick - Holding up a mirror to America

Ryan Broderick - Holding up a mirror to America

There Was Nothing Ever Unique About TikTok And I Can Prove It

—By Adam Bumas

As of writing this, the Supreme Court has ruled that TikTok is banned in the US. Former President Joe Biden said he wouldn’t enforce it as he left office over the weekend. President Donald Trump has said he supports a 90-day extension to explore a 50% US ownership of the app. And ByteDance is not against some kind of deal to keep it running. And service providers like Oracle are the ones left trying to figure out the legal liability of allowing TikTok access to continue in the US amid all of this. It’s become, predictably, a big giant political rats nest. Made even stupider and uglier by the fact that, if our lawmakers were to really look at TikTok data from the last six years, as I have, they’d know that none of this will actually “kill” TikTok’s influence because it doesn’t actually have any. Let me explain.

I was studying and analyzing TikTok long before I started working for Garbage Day, but for the past few years, as part of my work on this newsletter, I’ve been tracking what’s trending on TikTok month-to-month. And my biggest insight from years of lurking on the country’s various For You Pages is that the “TikTok trend,” as we understand it, does not actually exist.

Almost everything popular meme on the app either starts elsewhere or gets popular after it moves off the platform. And this has been true since TikTok’s first big viral moment in late 2019, thanks to Charli D’Amelio, who had the app’s most-followed account until 2022. A competitive dancer, D’Amelio’s success came from performing the elaborately choreographed dances like “The Renegade” that were TikTok’s bread and butter in its early days. After D’Amelio’s video started going viral, though, she was blasted for not actually choreographing any of the dances herself, but got all the credit, attention, and ad revenue (and a cringe Jimmy Fallon segment).

In 2020, two weeks after D’Amelio parlayed her TikTok fame to a Super Bowl ad, journalist Taylor Lorenz profiled the Renegade dance’s original choreographer. Jalaiah Harmon had originally posted the dance on an app called Funimate, before reposting it to Instagram, where it then spread to TikTok. It’s been forgotten at this point, but much of TikTok’s early popularity depended on these other short-form video apps — Dubsmash, Likee, and even Vine — and completely monopolized any attention the original sources might have gotten. But TikTok doesn’t just feed off its competitors. The overwhelming majority of TikTok trends that get big enough for someone like me to actually monitor wouldn’t exist without places like YouTube and Reddit feeding them, as well.

The way TikTok gobbles up the rest of the web means finding the sources for TikTok trends is like seeing the rings on the tree for internet culture. The craze for Stanley water bottles started on a mommy blog. Aesthetics like cottagecore are holdovers from Tumblr. More recently, the efforts by other tech companies to copy TikTok have had their own successes. Skibidi Toilet started as a YouTube Short, and Haliey Welch said “hawk tuah” in an Instagram Reel.

Of course, most normal people don’t care about where the fun online thing they saw comes from. When writer Emma Stefansky for Thrillist tried to untangle the thread of a dance D’Amelio performed, Stefansky wrote, “Following an internet trend's virality is almost as complex and random as the forces that drive something to go viral in the first place.”

But the enormous financial and social — and political — dividends we’ve bestowed on TikTok popularity means it really does matter to the folks in charge. TikTok fame can wreck communities under the strain, give businesses too many customers to handle, and make tourist hotspots too hot to visit. None of these were unpopular before the algorithm blew them up, since, from what I’ve seen, they couldn’t have sustained interest otherwise. But the reason so many things now get lumped into “TikTok trends” is mostly a matter of headcount. Wherever these trends originate, the app exposes them to an enormous and fiercely engaged new audience that uses their algorithm to navigate the overcrowded cultural landscape. Ironically, they become the ones doing the overcrowding.

I wouldn’t say it’s true that nothing big starts on TikTok, but it’s got to leave it fast. The first time I covered the site it was to report on Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical in 2020. The actual show starring Tony winners, which even got Disney’s blessing to raise money for Broadway actors put out of work by the pandemic, started with a TikTok. Crucially, though, there were only about five days between a remix of the original starting the trend in earnest, and an enterprising theater kid doing the actual organizational work to mount the show. But there are plenty of other “trends” like this that languish on random For You Pages and disappear back into the digital swamp, without their obligatory TODAY Show segment.

And I honestly get a little sad when I look into the history of something that’s starting to spread on people’s FYPs and see it treated as “a new trend” over and over as the algorithm forgets and rediscovers it. Have you heard about this not-at-all-new thing called mewing, which I had to look into a few weeks ago? If you didn’t hear about the latest trend from last November, maybe you might recognize it from last March, or the September before that, or the January before that, or the July before that, or the October before that. I mean, come on!

This TikTok self-cannibalization is why it’s so rare to see a trend that’s entirely homegrown on the app. Though, it’s not just the algorithm, but the culture its total dominion creates, where you genuinely can’t be sure if anyone will see your video if the algorithm doesn’t like it. It leads to a whole new lexicon of euphemisms, hashtags that look like keysmashing, and a culture of discouragement — even fear — of posting anything not on-trend. And when there is something really new and really native to TikTok — whether that’s “Who TF Did I Marry” or the Keith Lee effect — it’s usually from young people of color, who, like with the D’Amelio dance, are forgotten about the minute a white teenager takes it and runs with it.

This all isn’t to say that there was nothing novel about TikTok. It obviously did give Americans genuinely new ways to communicate and create culture, but the culture we created with it was always there. Thanks to TikTok, America finally saw itself and it scared us. It turns out Americans don’t talk the way we think they should, don’t dress the way we expected, dance the way we’d like, or have the political beliefs our lawmakers have been told we do. A Chinese tech company gave us a mirror and our politicians hated it so much they’d rather destroy it — or try and control it — than face the reflection staring back at us.