Nov 16, 2025
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Tiktok Takes Over
by Doniphan Blair
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Loren Gray, Tiktok’s long reigning queen, who started charting on the app when she was 13. photo: courtesy L. GrayNOTE: Sadly, as with many social media apps, Tiktok has been infiltrated by haters and white supremacists, although the under-200 reported postings is minimal compared to the millions of users, see article.
WITH MOST OF US SHELTERING IN PLACE
during the pandemic, traffic has increased on Facebook and Google, but only about 15%. Meanwhile, Zoom and HouseParty have emerged as the business and personal group meeting platforms of note.
But the brand new app for that, the truly fresh universe-in-your-phone—the Queen of the Corona, as it were—is Tiktok.
Since starting three years ago, Tiktok doubled last year, skyrocketed two months ago and is now counting almost a BILLION users. Originally targeting kids—indeed, 16 to 24 years olds comprise some 40% and up to 60% in the US—Tiktok is now the fourth most popular app on the planet, downloaded 750 million times last year!
Designed to make short videos and learn dances or songs, Tiktok has a ton of tools, including a sophisticate slow-motion function, for learning steps or lip-syncing, a split-screen for duets and lots of effects. Another button lets you “borrow” any Tiktok track, music or voice, which makes it radically multicultural.
Indeed, a popular Tiktok trick is lip-syncing previous Tiktoks: lily-white women reprising performances by gravelly-voiced black comedians, men doing toddlers, etc.
While such ventriloquism would be verboten anywhere else—raising the massive red flag of cultural appropriation, if not copyright lawsuits—not on Tiktok.
Actually, it is the center of the story. On Tiktok we are all equal, able to contribute, reenact or reveal, kids, commoners or celebs alike.
Although you’re legally required to be 16 to board the ride, Tiktok was first adopted by kids, many of whom resent the adult invasion. Alas, as noted, appropriation is at the heart of Tiktok.
There’s also a lot of talk on Tiktok of becoming “Tiktok famous.” If something catches the community’s fancy, they’ll shoot it 10,000 views or more within a matter of days. This frequently shocks the clip’s creator, often a bored-out-of-her-mind mother, or subject, a crotchety elder or some other odd character.
One such unlikely personage was Lil Nas X, country music's newest super star, who happens to be black and gay but whose “Old Town Road” spent 19 weeks at number one on the country charts last year. He owes it to Tiktok, where he first went viral in early 2019.
Charli D'Amelio, Tiktok's new queen, who is only 16, apparently has a sense of self-effacing humor. photo: courtesy C. D'AmelioIndeed, most of the stars in Tiktok heaven are singers, starting with Charli D'Amelio, a 16-year-old Connecticut woman who also dances and earned a cameo in a Super Bowl commercial last year. As of April, she had 41.4 million followers.
She is followed closely by Loren Gray, Tiktok’s previous queen, now with “only” 41.3 million acolytes. Gray first charted when she was 13, lip-syncing on musical.ly, Tiktok’s predecessor. Last year, she released her first single, "Can't Do It", a slick effort that brought accusations of "borrowing" from Billie Eilish.
Then comes Riyaz Afreen, a 17-year-old Indian actor, who likes to host other Indian celebs; Baby Ariel, a 19-year-old American, who also started on musical.ly, was named one of the internet’s biggest influencers by Time, in 2017, and now appears on the Disney Channel; and Addison Rae, also 19, who dances and lip-syncs.
In sixth place is the old man, Spencer X, a beatboxer (meaning he makes music with his mouth), who is 28, has 25.9 million followers and is sponsored by the energy drink Moster.
Before the pandemic, adult Tiktokers often included nurses, firefighters and US soldiers, since they like to kill time creatively between emergencies.
As Tiktok skyrocketed quite a few celebrities hopped onboard, ranging from Amy Schumer, Arianna Grande and Britney Spears to Kevin Hart, Tommy Lee and The Rock. Heck, I recently saw Anthony Hopkins, the 82-year-old English actor, doing a little dance in his living room.
Some celebs think it’s enough to show their face and wish us well, but others put serious thought into their one-minute-and-under pieces—seasoned Tockers frequently go longer and make you subscribe to get their reveal in part two.
Cute kids and animals are another pillar of the platform. But it is people dancing, often in large synchronized groups, or telling stories, some extremely personal, that seem to be its backbone—along with humor. The latter ranges from pranks to presidential parodies and talking dogs (which probably involves feeding them peanut butter to get the vigorous chewing that can be synced to speech).
China's Tiktok queen, actress, model and singer Dilraba Dilmurat, has over 55 million followers. photo: courtesy D. DilmuratAnother unique development is the Tiktok challenge, like someone agreeing to do something if another person gets 10,000 likes, say. Or there's the young women lip-syncing the Mahogany Lox song, with the line, “I can take your man, if I want to,” to which the generally-older woman responds, in her own Tiktok, something like, “When will you be coming by, since I have to run an errand.”
Tiktokers are amazingly politically incorrect on gender issues.
Women and gays—generally speaking, of course—adore Tiktok’s “beauty” button, a filter which smooths skin and erases under-eye shadow. Indeed, they like to augment that feature by using the hand motion of pressing a pretend button onscreen—actually it's in an internal menu—to cut to themselves done up to the nines, a welcome relief after being stuck at home in the time of Corona.
China has contributed quite a bit to civilization, from gunpowder to great food, but it has yet to produce a pop hit, until Tiktok.
Called Douyin there, the app debuted in 2016 from ByteDance, a company started in Shanghai by Zhang Yiming. Then, in November, 2017 ByteDance went big and bought musical.ly, a similarly-structured and already-popular app, built by another Shanghai startup, founded by Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang.
Estimates are that ByteDance spent up to $1 billion, a challenging chunk of change to recoup through the ads, which roll by about every eighth image and look like regular Tiktoks until a big button appears at the bottom to whisk you to the advertiser’s site. Not a bad investment given musical.ly had an office in Santa Monica, California, and an American user list of over ten million and ByteDance is currently appraised at over $75 billion.
No wonder The Tok attracted the attention of The Book, which cooked up Lasso, a shameless knock-off, although the Big Zuck appears to be a bit embarrassed. Indeed, Facebook doesn’t dare go head-to-head with Tiktok, which is already in 150 countries, using 39 languages (which can be easily changed in the “profile” tab). Apparently, they are focusing on languages Tiktok doesn’t feature.
Some of the large group, synchronized dancing made easy by Tiktok. photo: unknownHence, although China produced Covid-19, it also provided a cultural cure. While not a medical remedy, obviously—that would really rocket China to the top of the pop charts—humor is known to be healthy.
Along with bringing the funny, Tiktok’s healing waters are personified by its dance numbers, honed to a “T” by its slow-motion learning system, and the people spilling their guts, a combo which turns Tiktok into nothing less than a group-effort musical.
Enabling this is its two-headed ethos of irreverence and revelation—what a lot of people call “cringe-y.” This includes people talking about loneliness, heartbreak, disabilities, addiction, fights or how they are getting trolled in the comment section.
Nonetheless, user monitoring keeps Tiktok from veering into mean-spiritedness or outright bad taste.
A down-home medium, Tiktok is made even more egalitarian by how it wears its navigation on its sleeve. With its “follow,” “like” and other buttons pasted right on top of the video, along with hash tags, song titles and the onscreen graphics some Tockers add on, Tiktok itself is a mess.
“The medium is the message,” according to Marshall McLuhan, the famous media philosopher from Canada, despite the fact that the title of his groundbreaking 1967 book is “The Medium is the Massage.”
As it happened, the book’s printer made a massive typographical error right on the cover. But when McLuhan received his advanced copies, he loved the serendipity and new meaning and released it as is.
McLuhan would have adored Tiktok, not only for the mess of it or how it massages the psyche of people stuck at home, but because of the message embedded in its tech, which is cooperative, personal and low-fi.
You can view Tiqtoq conglomerations on YouTube, generally of Tiktok queens, from the slick, highly-edited American women to the achingly naïve and romantic “Top Ten Tiktok Queens of Bhutan”.
Double amputee Isabelle Weall demos her Tiktok makeup hacks, see her YouTube. photo: courtesy I. WeallBut the conglomerations are presented as pristine vertical videos, despite the fact that, on Tiqtoq, they’re cluttered messes, since there’s no button or even deep menu selection to clear the screen. While this is annoying to the aesthetic among us, it reinforces another Tiqtoq commandment: don’t take yourself, your clip or your problems, like being stuck at home, too seriously.
Indeed, Tiktok’s over-sharing culture fits perfectly into our new sequester society, led by the brave individuals who talk about their problems or selfie their disabilities.
I saw one fearless Tiktoker with no legs, racing agilely on his arms to his front door, while reflecting on how he become Tiktok famous, only to be greeted on his porch by a neighbor shouting, “But you still have no legs!” Although I tried to look up and find the handle of this incredibly honest and self-effacing Tocker, it was hard because the platform has an enormous amputee community (go here).
While your “likes” bring clips in your language as well as taste, it is fascinating to peruse another country’s Tiktok. Tiktok is super-popular in India and the new kid rocketing up the rolls is Brazil, but China is still tops. Indeed, China accounts not only for 57% of all Tockers worldwide BUT 80% of actual logged-on minutes.
Hence, the biggest Tiktok star is actually Douyin’s Dilraba Dilmurat, an actress, model and singer with 55 million plus followers. Moreover, almost two thirds of China’s 400 million daily Douyin users—as of January, 2020, and almost double January, 2019, phenomenal number by any measure—are women.
Indian Tiktokers, who clock in with "only" 119 million, appear to follow similar styles as Americans, if with less lip-syncing and cute kids and more pec-flexing among men and written-out routines—indeed, a number of Indians have died trying to create a “killer” Tock.
Which brings us to the dark side.
TikTok was banned briefly in India in 2019 for pornographic content and not safeguarding young users' info, which aided predators. Although ByteDance raced out reports addressing these accusations, the platform's admin, unlike in its content, is not completely transparent.
Indeed, two former TikTok queens—the German twins Lisa and Lena (Mantler), lip-syncers with 32.7 million followers, who released a single in July, 2017—left TikTok for Instagram and YouTube in March, 2019, because they didn’t wish to promote an unsafe site (as of May 7th, however, they were back on The Tok).
Around the same time as India's ban, the US Federal Trade Commission levied a record $5.7 million fine on ByteDance for gathering data on minors under 13, and they were was soon under a similar investigation in England. As well as worries about data collection, authorities object to Tiktok's messaging, which allowed any Tocker to contact another, including adults with children, especially worrying since ByteDance failed to obtain parental consent for less than 13-year-old users.
Is The Tock gathering troves of data, including our phones, emails and social media contacts? Well, the Navy banned it over security concerns, and the US Congress started an investigation last December. One fear is that China’s military-industrial-espionage complex has backdoored Tiktok.
Although a cause for concern, it hasn’t slowed the shut-ins mimicking each other’s dances, getting their dogs to talk or whispering secrets about themselves, their exes or bosses.
And so we have it, a true people’s revolution from the capitalists of communist China. Although it is a land of famously-reserved people, one of their inventions is now enabling the world to both tell cringey stories and do exuberant dances, which adds up one of the most honest views of our collective experience in the time of Corona.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached Posted on May 14, 2020 - 08:38 PM
by Doniphan Blair
Please support our stories by liking articles—thanks!
Loren Gray, Tiktok’s long reigning queen, who started charting on the app when she was 13. photo: courtesy L. GrayWITH MOST OF US SHELTERING IN PLACE
during the pandemic, traffic has increased on Facebook and Google, but only about 15%. Meanwhile, Zoom and HouseParty have emerged as the business and personal group meeting platforms of note.
But the brand new app for that, the truly fresh universe-in-your-phone—the Queen of the Corona, as it were—is Tiktok.
Since starting three years ago, Tiktok doubled last year, skyrocketed two months ago and is now counting almost a BILLION users. Originally targeting kids—indeed, 16 to 24 years olds comprise some 40% and up to 60% in the US—Tiktok is now the fourth most popular app on the planet, downloaded 750 million times last year!
Designed to make short videos and learn dances or songs, Tiktok has a ton of tools, including a sophisticate slow-motion function, for learning steps or lip-syncing, a split-screen for duets and lots of effects. Another button lets you “borrow” any Tiktok track, music or voice, which makes it radically multicultural.
Indeed, a popular Tiktok trick is lip-syncing previous Tiktoks: lily-white women reprising performances by gravelly-voiced black comedians, men doing toddlers, etc.
While such ventriloquism would be verboten anywhere else—raising the massive red flag of cultural appropriation, if not copyright lawsuits—not on Tiktok.
Actually, it is the center of the story. On Tiktok we are all equal, able to contribute, reenact or reveal, kids, commoners or celebs alike.
Although you’re legally required to be 16 to board the ride, Tiktok was first adopted by kids, many of whom resent the adult invasion. Alas, as noted, appropriation is at the heart of Tiktok.
There’s also a lot of talk on Tiktok of becoming “Tiktok famous.” If something catches the community’s fancy, they’ll shoot it 10,000 views or more within a matter of days. This frequently shocks the clip’s creator, often a bored-out-of-her-mind mother, or subject, a crotchety elder or some other odd character.
One such unlikely personage was Lil Nas X, country music's newest super star, who happens to be black and gay but whose “Old Town Road” spent 19 weeks at number one on the country charts last year. He owes it to Tiktok, where he first went viral in early 2019.
Charli D'Amelio, Tiktok's new queen, who is only 16, apparently has a sense of self-effacing humor. photo: courtesy C. D'AmelioShe is followed closely by Loren Gray, Tiktok’s previous queen, now with “only” 41.3 million acolytes. Gray first charted when she was 13, lip-syncing on musical.ly, Tiktok’s predecessor. Last year, she released her first single, "Can't Do It", a slick effort that brought accusations of "borrowing" from Billie Eilish.
Then comes Riyaz Afreen, a 17-year-old Indian actor, who likes to host other Indian celebs; Baby Ariel, a 19-year-old American, who also started on musical.ly, was named one of the internet’s biggest influencers by Time, in 2017, and now appears on the Disney Channel; and Addison Rae, also 19, who dances and lip-syncs.
In sixth place is the old man, Spencer X, a beatboxer (meaning he makes music with his mouth), who is 28, has 25.9 million followers and is sponsored by the energy drink Moster.
Before the pandemic, adult Tiktokers often included nurses, firefighters and US soldiers, since they like to kill time creatively between emergencies.
As Tiktok skyrocketed quite a few celebrities hopped onboard, ranging from Amy Schumer, Arianna Grande and Britney Spears to Kevin Hart, Tommy Lee and The Rock. Heck, I recently saw Anthony Hopkins, the 82-year-old English actor, doing a little dance in his living room.
Some celebs think it’s enough to show their face and wish us well, but others put serious thought into their one-minute-and-under pieces—seasoned Tockers frequently go longer and make you subscribe to get their reveal in part two.
Cute kids and animals are another pillar of the platform. But it is people dancing, often in large synchronized groups, or telling stories, some extremely personal, that seem to be its backbone—along with humor. The latter ranges from pranks to presidential parodies and talking dogs (which probably involves feeding them peanut butter to get the vigorous chewing that can be synced to speech).
China's Tiktok queen, actress, model and singer Dilraba Dilmurat, has over 55 million followers. photo: courtesy D. DilmuratTiktokers are amazingly politically incorrect on gender issues.
Women and gays—generally speaking, of course—adore Tiktok’s “beauty” button, a filter which smooths skin and erases under-eye shadow. Indeed, they like to augment that feature by using the hand motion of pressing a pretend button onscreen—actually it's in an internal menu—to cut to themselves done up to the nines, a welcome relief after being stuck at home in the time of Corona.
China has contributed quite a bit to civilization, from gunpowder to great food, but it has yet to produce a pop hit, until Tiktok.
Called Douyin there, the app debuted in 2016 from ByteDance, a company started in Shanghai by Zhang Yiming. Then, in November, 2017 ByteDance went big and bought musical.ly, a similarly-structured and already-popular app, built by another Shanghai startup, founded by Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang.
Estimates are that ByteDance spent up to $1 billion, a challenging chunk of change to recoup through the ads, which roll by about every eighth image and look like regular Tiktoks until a big button appears at the bottom to whisk you to the advertiser’s site. Not a bad investment given musical.ly had an office in Santa Monica, California, and an American user list of over ten million and ByteDance is currently appraised at over $75 billion.
No wonder The Tok attracted the attention of The Book, which cooked up Lasso, a shameless knock-off, although the Big Zuck appears to be a bit embarrassed. Indeed, Facebook doesn’t dare go head-to-head with Tiktok, which is already in 150 countries, using 39 languages (which can be easily changed in the “profile” tab). Apparently, they are focusing on languages Tiktok doesn’t feature.
Some of the large group, synchronized dancing made easy by Tiktok. photo: unknownAlong with bringing the funny, Tiktok’s healing waters are personified by its dance numbers, honed to a “T” by its slow-motion learning system, and the people spilling their guts, a combo which turns Tiktok into nothing less than a group-effort musical.
Enabling this is its two-headed ethos of irreverence and revelation—what a lot of people call “cringe-y.” This includes people talking about loneliness, heartbreak, disabilities, addiction, fights or how they are getting trolled in the comment section.
Nonetheless, user monitoring keeps Tiktok from veering into mean-spiritedness or outright bad taste.
A down-home medium, Tiktok is made even more egalitarian by how it wears its navigation on its sleeve. With its “follow,” “like” and other buttons pasted right on top of the video, along with hash tags, song titles and the onscreen graphics some Tockers add on, Tiktok itself is a mess.
“The medium is the message,” according to Marshall McLuhan, the famous media philosopher from Canada, despite the fact that the title of his groundbreaking 1967 book is “The Medium is the Massage.”
As it happened, the book’s printer made a massive typographical error right on the cover. But when McLuhan received his advanced copies, he loved the serendipity and new meaning and released it as is.
McLuhan would have adored Tiktok, not only for the mess of it or how it massages the psyche of people stuck at home, but because of the message embedded in its tech, which is cooperative, personal and low-fi.
You can view Tiqtoq conglomerations on YouTube, generally of Tiktok queens, from the slick, highly-edited American women to the achingly naïve and romantic “Top Ten Tiktok Queens of Bhutan”.
Double amputee Isabelle Weall demos her Tiktok makeup hacks, see her YouTube. photo: courtesy I. WeallIndeed, Tiktok’s over-sharing culture fits perfectly into our new sequester society, led by the brave individuals who talk about their problems or selfie their disabilities.
I saw one fearless Tiktoker with no legs, racing agilely on his arms to his front door, while reflecting on how he become Tiktok famous, only to be greeted on his porch by a neighbor shouting, “But you still have no legs!” Although I tried to look up and find the handle of this incredibly honest and self-effacing Tocker, it was hard because the platform has an enormous amputee community (go here).
While your “likes” bring clips in your language as well as taste, it is fascinating to peruse another country’s Tiktok. Tiktok is super-popular in India and the new kid rocketing up the rolls is Brazil, but China is still tops. Indeed, China accounts not only for 57% of all Tockers worldwide BUT 80% of actual logged-on minutes.
Hence, the biggest Tiktok star is actually Douyin’s Dilraba Dilmurat, an actress, model and singer with 55 million plus followers. Moreover, almost two thirds of China’s 400 million daily Douyin users—as of January, 2020, and almost double January, 2019, phenomenal number by any measure—are women.
Indian Tiktokers, who clock in with "only" 119 million, appear to follow similar styles as Americans, if with less lip-syncing and cute kids and more pec-flexing among men and written-out routines—indeed, a number of Indians have died trying to create a “killer” Tock.
Which brings us to the dark side.
TikTok was banned briefly in India in 2019 for pornographic content and not safeguarding young users' info, which aided predators. Although ByteDance raced out reports addressing these accusations, the platform's admin, unlike in its content, is not completely transparent.
Indeed, two former TikTok queens—the German twins Lisa and Lena (Mantler), lip-syncers with 32.7 million followers, who released a single in July, 2017—left TikTok for Instagram and YouTube in March, 2019, because they didn’t wish to promote an unsafe site (as of May 7th, however, they were back on The Tok).
Around the same time as India's ban, the US Federal Trade Commission levied a record $5.7 million fine on ByteDance for gathering data on minors under 13, and they were was soon under a similar investigation in England. As well as worries about data collection, authorities object to Tiktok's messaging, which allowed any Tocker to contact another, including adults with children, especially worrying since ByteDance failed to obtain parental consent for less than 13-year-old users.
Is The Tock gathering troves of data, including our phones, emails and social media contacts? Well, the Navy banned it over security concerns, and the US Congress started an investigation last December. One fear is that China’s military-industrial-espionage complex has backdoored Tiktok.
Although a cause for concern, it hasn’t slowed the shut-ins mimicking each other’s dances, getting their dogs to talk or whispering secrets about themselves, their exes or bosses.
And so we have it, a true people’s revolution from the capitalists of communist China. Although it is a land of famously-reserved people, one of their inventions is now enabling the world to both tell cringey stories and do exuberant dances, which adds up one of the most honest views of our collective experience in the time of Corona.
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached Posted on May 14, 2020 - 08:38 PM
