TikTok Is the Latest Reason Teens Are Addicted To Their Phones

The app is perfect for spreading memes, but good luck deciphering things like the ‘microwave challenge’ if you’re not in on the joke. TikTok Is the Latest Reason Teens Are Addicted To Their Phones

When Holly Grace, a 23-year-old part-time singer and full-time nurse in Nashville, Tenn., first started making videos for the app TikTok, she had no idea she was any good at creating memes—those viral bits of content that have been the internet’s raison d’être since millions discovered a moronic website called “Hampster Dance” 20 years ago.

As Ms. Grace soon discovered, people love her shtick—a real, working nurse who can lip-sync to whatever 15-second snippet of pop music is trending on TikTok that week.

TikTok Is The Place To Go For Financial Advice If You’re A Young Adult

Facebook Offers Money To Reel In TikTok Creators

Trump Gets KPOP’d And Tic Toc’d As Teens Mobilized To Derail Trump’s Tulsa Rally

Rise of The FinFluencer And How They Target Young And Inexperienced Investors

Virginia-Based Defense Contractor Working For U.S. National-Security Agencies Use Google Apps To Secretly Steal Your Data

Apple Along With Meta And Secret Service Agents Fooled By Law Enforcement Impersonators

The app, owned by Chinese startup Bytedance, is growing in popularity with young people at a rate that could make it the next Snapchat. User videos on the site are grouped by the songs they use and ranked according to popularity, so Ms. Grace figured the best way to rack up followers—she now has more than 390,000 of them—was to embrace the format. She would put her own twist on some viral TikTok video or another, usually referencing topics relatable to other medical professionals.

Before she knew it, TikTok reached out to her and gave her a “manager” within the company, to help make her videos even more viral by flagging trending songs and discussing what had and hadn’t worked in her past videos.

“It was completely unexpected—at the beginning I wanted to be a medical missionary,” says Ms. Grace, who says her faith informs her desire to reach people on TikTok. “But now I’ve realized that nursing could be a really cool platform to impact people, and I’ve developed a passion for being a nurse influencer.”

The word “meme” was coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins well before the internet was being used by anyone other than a few far-flung computer nerds. He defined it as “a unit of cultural transmission,” and intended that the word sound like “gene.”

Modern-day memes have become the lingua franca of our digital world, allowing people to communicate in an often humorous kind of shorthand. Even if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’ve perhaps heard of Grumpy Cat, or that dress that was either blue or white, or the “Gangnam Style” video that forced YouTube to add more digits to its view counter. All of them went viral, and then became memes as people appropriated them for their own uses, taking the picture of Grumpy Cat, for example, and adding a couple lines of text about one way or another that people are annoying.

Brad Kim, editor in chief at Know Your Meme, a website devoted to the obsessive, even academic, study of memes, says they are best understood as a cluster of ideas that people reproduce and iterate on, altering their meaning as they go. Originally just widely shared pictures or videos, memes have become something anyone can easily create and exchange. For Generation Z and younger Millennials, they’re a way to get beyond the limits of plain text.

“One of the problems of text is you lose the tone,” says Chris Slowe, chief technology officer of Reddit. “But if the meme is well known, you get a certain kind of tone and way of reading it that either helps the joke or helps get across what you’re trying to say.”

In other words, they’re a language of sorts, often laden with coded references or sentiments that are inscrutable to anyone born before the first Bush presidency. And certainly, being in on a joke that’s lost on older generations can be part of the allure.

Can You Dance to It?

Meme generator sites make it easy to drop text over a recognizable image, like Grumpy Cat, the “Most Interesting Man” from the Dos Equis ads, or a stock photo of a boyfriend who’s staring at an attractive stranger. These can be shared across image boards and forums, from Tumblr and Reddit to Twitter , Facebook and Instagram.

But picture memes—often known as snowclones, for reasons too complicated to go into here—are now old hat, says Mr. Kim. As young people move on to sites where the native language is video, like YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram’s stories feature, the content of memes has changed, and music and visual gags like those created by Ms. Grace predominate.

Sophisticated in-app editing tools also dramatically increase the speed with which memes rise and fall. Kids are creating new memes without waiting for them to develop a broader meaning or deep history, and just communicating with what’s essentially a homegrown visual language, says Mr. Kim.

Fans of shows like “Game of Thrones” are creating memes about individual episodes almost as fast as they’re shown, says Reddit’s Mr. Slowe. The result is layers upon layers of in-jokes that feel highly relatable to dedicated, connected fans of the show, and no one else.

Sally Kuchar, a 36-year-old self-described “meme explainer” who works in communications for a nonprofit, has developed a reputation for deciphering TikTok memes for fellow Millennials on Twitter. One of her recent explainers unpacked the origins and spread of the “microwave challenge,” which has all the hallmarks of a TikTok meme: a catchy tune, a reproducible visual trope and, most important, a hilarious twist. (I mean “twist” literally, as the challenge involves finding inventive ways to very slowly rotate your body like food on a microwave tray.)

All Fun and Games Until…

Like all modes of communication, memes are neither good or bad. Mostly they’re about self-expression—relating with people and amusing them—but occasionally they’re used for darker purposes.

As memes become a new way of communicating on digital platforms, they’re used for every sort of communication and dissemination, including communicating hate speech and extremist ideologies, as we saw with the meme-soaked writings and visual signals of New Zealand’s Christchurch shooter.

Ms. Grace experienced the dark side of memes when one of her videos—an otherwise innocent clip about kids’ famous disdain for vegetables—was reappropriated. Accounts primarily devoted to mocking and degrading internet micro-celebrities (such as Ms. Grace) spread her video on Twitter, YouTube and Instagram as an example of vegan gloating.

This being the internet, Ms. Grace received weeks of harassing messages, and even death threats, both in the comments on the video on TikTok and through direct messages on Instagram, where anyone can message her.

“People were making memes like, ‘Why do vegans have to be so outward about eating vegetables?’” says Ms. Grace. Only thing: Ms. Grace isn’t a vegan, or even a vegetarian.

“Thankfully I have friends who are YouTubers and influencers and they were able to help me,” she adds. Everyone who becomes famous on the internet, they explained, is going to be harassed at some point or another.

As with other social networks that gain popularity, TikTok is inevitably becoming a place where people attempt to spread misinformation and hate speech. TikTok says its staff aggressively monitors content on the site, quickly removing or hiding videos that might raise alarms with parents or the media.

This month, a state court in India ordered an interim ban of TikTok, over concern that it encouraged the dissemination of pornography and could allow children to be targeted by sexual predators. The government has since lifted the ban.

“We are glad about this decision and we believe it is also greatly welcomed by our thriving community in India,” says a TikTok spokeswoman. “We are committed to continuously enhancing our safety features as a testament to our ongoing commitment to our users in India,” she adds.

Still, the company appears as if it wants avoid further rankling India’s politicians or courts. As elections in the country approach, TikTok is preemptively warning users there not to “share unlawful content” and to “guard against fake news by always referring to verified news sources.”

Meanwhile, being memed for meming hasn’t broken Ms. Grace’s stride. While TikTok doesn’t yet have the same culture of sponsored content as Instagram, the up-and-coming nurse influencer says her favorite brand of scrubs just reached out to make her their social-media brand ambassador.

Updated: 11-2-2019

U.S. Launches National Security Review of Video App TikTok

Move follows concerns from U.S. senators that Chinese-owned company censors content to appease Beijing.

The U.S. has undertaken a national security review of the popular video-sharing app TikTok, following concerns expressed by U.S. senators that the Chinese-owned company was censoring content to appease Beijing, according to a person familiar with the matter.

TikTok said it couldn’t “comment on ongoing regulatory processes,” but said it “has made clear that we have no higher priority than earning the trust of users and regulators in the U.S. Part of that effort includes working with Congress and we are committed to doing so.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) last month called for a national-security review of the 2017 acquisition that enabled the Chinese owner of video-sharing app TikTok to expand its reach in the U.S., saying the platform’s moderators are censoring content to appease Beijing.

In a letter to the Treasury Department, Mr. Rubio cited “growing evidence” that TikTok’s platform is censoring content as China has sought to block sympathetic coverage of protests in Hong Kong and reports about China’s treatment of Muslim minorities, among other moves.

Last week, Sens. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) also asked the acting director of national intelligence to conduct an assessment of the national security risks of TikTok.

“The U.S. government investigation into TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, if true, is welcome news,” Mr. Schumer said. “This new investigation is validation of our concern that apps like TikTok—that store massive amounts of personal data accessible to foreign governments—may pose serious risks to millions of Americans and deserve greater scrutiny.”

The review was earlier reported by Reuters.

TikTok is owned by Beijing ByteDance Technology Co., which acquired video-sharing platform Musical.ly in 2017. Shanghai-based Musical.ly, which had an office in Santa Monica, Calif., built a strong U.S. user base, with 60 million monthly active users globally at the time of the deal.

After the acquisition, the Musical.ly platform, was abandoned in favor of TikTok.

Mr. Rubio’s letter came after a recent report in the Guardian that TikTok directed moderators to actively censor certain videos—news that came after only a few videos of protests in Hong Kong by democracy advocates circulated via the app.

TikTok has said that its content moderation policies aren’t influenced by any government and that the Chinese government hasn’t requested that TikTok censor content.

The Treasury Department oversees the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., a panel of federal agencies that reviews deals that involve foreign money to ensure they don’t put the country’s national security at risk. It declined comment Friday. The panel has the power to review deals that involve U.S. companies, such as the 2017 acquisition.

Related Articles:

Soon Your Phone Will Be Your Driver’s License, MetroCard And More (#GotBitcoin?)

Venmo And Amazon Hit By Breaches And Fraudsters (#GotBitcoin?)

Venmo To Users: If You Owe Us Money, We’re Coming For It (#GotBitcoin?)

Square’s Cash App. Allows Users To Buy Bitcoin In 50 States, Sees Downloads Outpace Venmo Again (#GotBitcoin?)

Real Estate Brokerages Now Accepting Bitcoin (#GotBitcoin?)

Ernst & Young Introduces Tax Tool For Reporting Cryptocurrencies (#GotBitcoin?)

Recession Is Looming, or Not. Here’s How To Know (#GotBitcoin?)

How Will Bitcoin Behave During A Recession? (#GotBitcoin?)

Many U.S. Financial Officers Think a Recession Will Hit Next Year (#GotBitcoin?)

Definite Signs of An Imminent Recession (#GotBitcoin?)

What A Recession Could Mean for Women’s Unemployment (#GotBitcoin?)