tiktok video essays

The video essay boom

Hour-long YouTube videos are thriving in the TikTok era. Their popularity reflects our desire for more nuanced content online.

by Terry Nguyen

A stock image illustration of a girl sitting on a couch, filming herself.

The video essay’s reintroduction into my adult life was, like many things, a side effect of the pandemic. On days when I couldn’t bring myself to read recreationally, I tried to unwind after work by watching hours and hours of YouTube.

My pseudo-intellectual superego, however, soon became dissatisfied with the brain-numbing monotony of “day in the life” vlogs, old Bon Appétit test kitchen videos, and makeup tutorials. I wanted content that was entertaining, but simultaneously informational, thoughtful, and analytical. In short, I wanted something that gave the impression that I, the passive viewer, was smart. Enter: the video essay.

Video essays have been around for about a decade, if not more, on YouTube. There is some debate over how the form preceded the platform; some film scholars believe the video essay was born out of and remains heavily influenced by essay films , a type of nonfiction filmmaking. Regardless, YouTube has become the undisputed home of the contemporary video essay. Since 2012, when the platform began to prioritize watch-time over views , the genre flourished. These videos became a significant part of the 2010s YouTube landscape, and were popularized by creators across film, politics, and academic subcultures.

Today, there are video essays devoted to virtually any topic you can think of, ranging anywhere from about 10 minutes to upward of an hour. The video essay has been a means to entertain fan theories , explore the lore of a video game or a historical deep dive , explain or critique a social media trend , or like most written essays, expound upon an argument, hypothesis , or curiosity proposed by the creator.

Some of the best-known video essay creators — Lindsay Ellis, Natalie Wynn of ContraPoints, and Abigail Thorn of PhilosophyTube — are often associated with BreadTube , an umbrella term for a group of left-leaning, long-form YouTubers who provide intellectualized commentary on political and cultural topics.

It’s not an exaggeration to claim that I — and many of my fellow Gen Zers — were raised on video essays, academically and intellectually. They were helpful resources for late-night cramming sessions (thanks Crash Course), and responsible for introducing a generation to first-person commentary on all sorts of cultural and political phenomena. Now, the kids who grew up on this content are producing their own.

“Video essays are a form that has lent itself particularly well to pop culture because of its analytical nature,” Madeline Buxton, the culture and trends manager at YouTube, told me. “We are starting to see more creators using video essays to comment on growing trends across social media. They’re serving as sort of real-time internet historians by helping viewers understand not just what is a trend, but the larger cultural context of something.”

A lot has been said about the video essay and its ever-shifting parameters . What does seem newly relevant is how the video essay is becoming repackaged, as long-form video creators find a home on platforms besides YouTube. This has played out concurrently with the pandemic-era shift toward short-form video, with Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube respectively launching Reels, Spotlight, and Shorts to compete against TikTok.

TikTok’s sudden, unwavering rise has proven the viability of bite-size content, and the app’s addictive nature has spawned fears about young people’s dwindling attention spans. Yet, the prevailing popularity of video essays, from new and old creators alike, suggests otherwise. Audiences have not been deterred from watching lengthy videos, nor has the short-form pivot significantly affected creators and their output. Emerging video essayists aren’t shying away from length or nuance, even while using TikTok or Reels as a supplement to grow their online following.

One can even argue that we are witnessing the video essay’s golden era . Run times are longer than ever, while more and more creators are producing long-form videos. The growth of “creator economy” crowdfunding tools, especially during the pandemic, has allowed video essayists to take longer breaks between uploads while retaining their production quality.

“I do feel some pressure to make my videos longer because my audience continues to ask for it,” said Tiffany Ferguson, a YouTube creator specializing in media criticism and pop culture commentary. “I’ve seen comments, both on my own videos and those I watch, where fans are like, ‘Yes, you’re feeding us,’ when it comes to longer videos, especially the hour to two-hour ones. In a way, the mentality seems to be: The longer the better.”

In a Medium post last April, the blogger A. Khaled remarked that viewers were “willing to indulge user-generated content that is as long as a multi-million dollar cinematic production by a major Hollywood studio” — a notion that seemed improbable just a few years ago, even to the most popular video essayists. To creators, this hunger for well-edited, long-form video is unprecedented and uniquely suitable for pandemic times.

The internet might’ve changed what we pay attention to, but it hasn’t entirely shortened our attention span, argued Jessica Maddox, an assistant professor of digital media technology at the University of Alabama. “It has made us more selective about the things we want to devote our attention to,” she told me. “People are willing to devote time to content they find interesting.”

“People are willing to devote time to content they find interesting”

Every viewer is different, of course. I find that my attention starts to wane around the 20-minute mark if I’m actively watching and doing nothing else — although I will admit to once spending a non-consecutive four hours on an epic Twin Peaks explainer . Last month, the channel Folding Ideas published a two-hour video essay on “the problem with NFTs,” which has garnered more than 6 million views so far.

Hour-plus-long videos can be hits, depending on the creator, the subject matter, the production quality, and the audience base that the content attracts. There will always be an early drop-off point with some viewers, according to Ferguson, who make it about two to five minutes into a video essay. Those numbers don’t often concern her; she trusts that her devoted subscribers will be interested enough to stick around.

“About half of my viewers watch up to the halfway point, and a smaller group finishes the entire video,” Ferguson said. “It’s just how YouTube is. If your video is longer than two minutes, I think you’re going to see that drop-off regardless if it’s for a video that’s 15 or 60 minutes long.”

Some video essayists have experimented with shorter content as a topic testing ground for longer videos or as a discovery tool to reach new audiences, whether it be on the same platform (like Shorts) or an entirely different one (like TikTok).

“Short-form video can expose people to topics or types of content they’re not super familiar with yet,” Maddox said. “Shorts are almost like a sampling of what you can get with long-form content.” The growth of Shorts, according to Buxton of YouTube, has given rise to this class of “hybrid creators,” who alternate between short- and long-form content. They can also be a starting point for new creators, who are not yet comfortable with scripting a 30-minute video.

Queline Meadows, a student in Ithaca College’s screen cultures program, became interested in how young people were using TikTok to casually talk about film, using editing techniques that borrowed heavily from video essays. She created her own YouTube video essay titled “The Rise of Film TikTok” to analyze the phenomenon, and produces both TikTok micro-essays and lengthy videos.

“I think people have a desire to understand things more deeply,” Meadows told me. “Even with TikTok, I find it hard to unfold an argument or explore multiple angles of a subject. Once people get tired of the hot takes, they want to sit with something that’s more nuanced and in-depth.”

It’s common for TikTokers to tease a multi-part video to gain followers. Many have attempted to direct viewers to their YouTube channel and other platforms for longer content. On the contrary, it’s in TikTok’s best interests to retain creators — and therefore viewers — on the app. In late February, TikTok announced plans to extend its maximum video length from three minutes to 10 minutes , more than tripling a video’s run-time possibility. This decision arrived months after TikTok’s move last July to start offering three-minute videos .

As TikTok inches into YouTube-length territory, Spotify, too, has introduced video on its platform, while YouTube has similarly signaled an interest in podcasting . In October, Spotify began introducing “video podcasts,” which allows listeners (or rather, viewers) to watch episodes. Users have the option to toggle between actively watching a podcast or traditionally listening to one.

What’s interesting about the video podcast is how Spotify is positioning it as an interchangeable, if not more intimate, alternative to a pure audio podcast. The video essay, then, appears to occupy a middle ground between podcast and traditional video by making use of these key elements. For creators, the boundaries are no longer so easy to define.

“Some video essay subcultures are more visual than others, while others are less so,” said Ferguson, who was approached by Spotify to upload her YouTube video essays onto the platform last year. “I was already in the process of trying to upload just the audio of my old videos since that’s more convenient for people to listen to and save on their podcast app. My reasoning has always been to make my content more accessible.”

To Ferguson, podcasts are a natural byproduct of the video essay. Many viewers are already consuming lengthy videos as ambient entertainment, as content to passively listen to while doing other tasks. The video essay is not a static format, and its development is heavily shaped by platforms, which play a crucial role in algorithmically determining how such content is received and promoted. Some of these changes are reflective of cultural shifts, too.

Maddox, who researches digital culture and media, has a theory that social media discourse is becoming less reactionary. She described it as a “simmering down” of the hot take, which is often associated with cancel culture . These days, more creators are approaching controversy from a removed, secondhand standpoint; they seem less interested in engendering drama for clicks. “People are still providing their opinions, but in conjunction with deep analysis,” Maddox said. “I think it says a lot about the state of the world and what holds people’s attention.”

That’s the power of the video essay. Its basic premise — whether the video is a mini-explainer or explores a 40-minute hypothesis — requires the creator to, at the very least, do their research. This often leads to personal disclaimers and summaries of alternative opinions or perspectives, which is very different from the more self-centered “reaction videos” and “story time” clickbait side of YouTube.

“The things I’m talking about are bigger than me. I recognize the limitations of my own experience,” Ferguson said. “Once I started talking about intersections of race, gender, sexuality — so many experiences that were different from my own — I couldn’t just share my own narrow, straight, white woman perspective. I have to provide context.”

This doesn’t change the solipsistic nature of the internet, but it is a positive gear shift, at least in the realm of social media discourse, that makes being chronically online a little less soul-crushing. The video essay, in a way, encourages us to engage in good faith with ideas that we might not typically entertain or think of ourselves. Video essays can’t solve the many problems of the internet (or the world, for that matter), but they can certainly make learning about them a little more bearable.

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Using TikTok for Your Academic Papers? Make Sure to Consult Other Sources

Information on TikTok is more interactive than what you find from a Google search. But ensuring the accuracy of that information is crucial to using TikTok to support your studies.

Two international students browsing TikTok together

Currently, more than 50% of four-year college students in the United States use TikTok videos for help with their homework. Students responding to the Intelligent.com survey noted they use TikTok mostly for help with math, English, and art (compared to other subjects). More than 34% of the survey’s respondents said they also used the platform to help complete their college application essays .

TikTok has become the go-to search engine for Gen Z. The content is interactive and, as a result, often more engaging than traditional web articles. For many students, this makes what they learn on TikTok stick more than, say, reading from a textbook with outdated stock images.

However, while there is space for TikTok in academia, it should not be the only source — or even the first source — you turn to for research. Here are some tips on how to use TikTok for academics in ways that support (instead of skewing) your learning.

Viral TikTok Videos as One Part of the Research Process

Like Wikipedia, TikTok makes it easier to find information. But while Wikipedia articles often cite sources, TikTok creators are not in the habit of including references.

That means it is on you to fact-check the information you find on TikTok to ensure its accuracy. This can be tricky, as TikTok is designed to keep you consuming content on the platform. You need to leave TikTok and consult other sources — a key part of the research process.

Viral TikTok videos can certainly be one part of your research process. For example, you may use TikTok as your first step in the process to get more information about a particular topic. Watching videos on TikTok may give you context for which additional questions to ask and the information you need to fact-check via other means, whether that is using a traditional search engine and consulting articles on Google or visiting the library.

The number of likes or views on a video or the number of followers a creator has is not an indicator of trustworthiness. Misinformation and disinformation are rampant across social media, including TikTok. Part of your job as a student is to gain the skills needed to analyze a source and verify information with other sources.

You also need to know what your professors expect and understand your university’s policies. There continue to be privacy concerns around the use of the app within the United States. In fact, Dr. Casey Fiesler, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, has discussed the topic on her TikTok channel.

Some universities, including Auburn University and the University of Mississippi, among others, have banned access to the app on their networks. You can still, of course, access the app on campus, but not via on-campus Wi-Fi.

Expanding Your TikTok Videos Search

The TikTok algorithm is wildly effective — if you like being shown more of the same type of content that you want to see. Videos are curated to your interests and, very quickly, it knows exactly what you like.

While that makes for a seemingly great user experience, it also means you are only seeing the world through a very small frame. Take a step back, and there is an entire world you are missing.

While the TikTok creator community is diverse, it does not mean that the videos you are served are diverse.

Scott Helfgott, vice president of academic affairs at Shorelight, recommends searching for opposing views to see what comes up. There are multiple perspectives to any event, and Helfgott encourages students to gather as many perspectives as they can.

This ensures that you are exposed to different cultures, perspectives, and experiences you might not see if you do not break out of the algorithm and what the algorithm is programmed to show you.

“You cannot rely on one TikTok video as a source of truth,” he says. “The video appears on your page because the algorithm knows you want to see specific content based on your history. There is another side of it.”

Understanding TikTok’s limitations and potential pitfalls will help you know when it is appropriate to use TikTok for academic purposes and when it is not. “Do your research before you accept what a person is telling you as truth — you do not know if the source is qualified,” stresses Helfgott.

According to a recent Intelligent.com survey , 65% of students believe the information on TikTok is “somewhat” accurate, while 17% believe it is “very accurate.”

Knowing whether the information is accurate or not will not come from research on the platform. It requires getting off TikTok and verifying the facts: go to the person’s LinkedIn profile, verify their bio, and confirm that this is a real person who is qualified to speak on the topic.

When Is it Appropriate to Cite TikTok Videos?

You may have certain classes where it is appropriate to use and cite TikTok videos as part of your assignment.

Ask your professors whether it is appropriate to use both traditional and new sources. “I have not heard of many professors accepting TikTok in isolation, without another source,” shares Helfgott. “It is up to the professor to decide whether they accept TikTok as a source, and this is evolving all the time.”

Helfgott recommends using TikTok to help develop writing and research skills, but not necessarily citing TikTok videos as a source unless doing so is appropriate for your assignment. “There typically needs to be something that you cite in addition to the TikTok video,” he says.

For example, a marketing course may have you look at how businesses are using TikTok to reach their customers. Are they connecting with their target audience? Are they selling too much in a way that turns their audience off? You can evaluate whether their TikTok advertising efforts are effective or not.

Writing courses, particularly courses like writing for the web or humor writing, may also have you spending time on TikTok for class. Part of the appeal of TikTok — and why some videos do so well — is because it is far more entertaining than content on other mediums.

Screenwriting and film courses may have you practicing writing scripts for TikTok videos. How can you tell a story in just a few seconds? (The sweet spot for TikTok videos is currently between 15 and 60 seconds .) Can you keep people engaged for a 10-minute story (the longest length currently allowed on TikTok)?

Even when it is appropriate to use TikTok videos for research, Helfgott stresses the importance of fact-checking. He points out that as artificial intelligence continues to improve, almost everything can be fake. Helfgott mentioned a video that combined footage of US President Biden with a completely fake speech that he never made. The video matched the speech to his mouth movements in a way that was hard to tell whether it was fake.

“With any research, including TikTok, you need to go to a lot of sources,” Helfgott explains. “You cannot rely on one individual or one type of source. You need multiple sources, multiple perspectives.”

If you are using TikTok as part of a course, you need to know how to cite the source and give credit to the creator. Both the Modern Language Association (MLA) and American Psychological Association (APA) have updated their style guides to include a format for citing TikTok.

Using TikTok to Support Your Learning

Rather than being a source you cite for classwork, TikTok instead can be a great way to supplement your learning. It combines visuals, audio, and text all in one place. And you may even find your professors are sharing content on the platform, too!

You can find videos on how to manage your time, how to write different types of essays, how to write a thesis statement, and more. It can be a great way to refresh what you learned in class. There are also videos that dig into specific math problems and English-language nuances.

For example, Andrea Holm has a master’s in technology in education and has spent years as an English teacher and English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher. Her videos offer bite-sized tips on one specific element of the English language, such as explaining the word “the” and how to use it.

For math, there are channels like Free GCSE Maths Teacher that break down algebra problems and other math concepts into quick videos, such as solving algebraic fractions . Watching how a problem is broken down step-by-step can be a great way to reinforce math concepts you are learning in the classroom.

There are even celebrity academics on TikTok, like Neil deGrasse Tyson who explains concepts like energy and how stars are born on his channel.

Helfgott also points out that you can use TikTok to find out about certain classes and majors, too. For example, you can search things like “What does a data analytics major do” and find videos on data analytics. You can also use it to find opportunities for things like summer internships or top firms for internships in a particular location.

When to Move from TikTok to In-Person Support

While TikTok can help offer quick tips that help you improve study habits, time management, and productivity, you can also receive that same support in person.

In-person support gives you a deeper, more comprehensive experience for improving study habits or getting the academic support you need. Plus, programs are tailored to your specific needs so you can ensure you are getting the right support.

Helfgott urges students to take advantage of professors’ office hours. Office hours are designed to give you answers to questions or additional help, whether you run out of time in class or feel more comfortable talking with your professor one-on-one.

Similarly, Stanford professor Tom Mullaney, who posts on TikTok as firstgenprofessor , regularly shares videos about navigating college courses and campus life overall — reinforcing the idea that while it’s great to begin on screen, nothing compares to in-person connections.

On TikTok, you can certainly find tons of videos on topics like resume writing and elevator pitches. That is a great way to get information before you take a first pass at writing your own resume, cover letter , and more. But you can also get one-on-one support on these materials. Experts can review your resume, help you with interview practice questions, and offer networking tips so that you are putting your best foot forward. (Shorelight’s career development services do just that, with resume and interview preparation help, assistance with internship and job searches, and more.)

Advisors can also help you navigate course selection and connect you with on-campus resources that can further support you. For example, Shorelight’s Accelerator programs offer both academic support and career development services . You can get English-language support , along with tutoring and mentoring.

Whichever university you decide to attend in the US will also have tutoring centers for writing, math, and languages. These centers can give you the one-on-one support you need from both experts and peer mentors who can help you review specific math problems or work with you on key elements of essay writing , for example.

Career centers are another great resource. Here, you can have confidence in the counselors’ credentials, Helfgott points out. These professionals have a master’s degree and are qualified to support your career search. “You can interact with them personally and build a relationship,” says Helfgott. “That is not going to happen when you are watching three- to five-minute videos from a stranger who may be unqualified to give advice.”

The advantage of working with experts on campus is that the university has vetted the person who is working with you.

Lastly, Helfgott offers one additional word of caution: “You may start on TikTok for academic reasons, but then you might go down a rabbit hole of non-academic content a few minutes later.” Set a timer for yourself so, if you find yourself watching cat videos, you can get back on track.

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Another Word

From the writing center at the university of wisconsin-madison.

photo of a laptop browser page open to TikTok’s homepage with a tab titled “TikTik-Make Your Day” (Credit: Unsplash)

#essayhack: What TikTok can Teach Writing Centers about Student Perceptions of College Writing

By Holly Berkowitz, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

There is a widespread perception that TikTok, the popular video-sharing social media platform, is primarily a tool of distraction where one mindlessly scrolls through bite-sized bits of content. However, due to the viewer’s ability to engage with short-form video content, it is undeniable that TikTok is also a platform from which users gain information; whether this means following a viral dance tutorial or learning how to fold a fitted sheet, TikTok houses millions of videos that serve as instructional tutorials that provides tips or how-tos for its over one billion active users.

That TikTok might be considered a learning tool also has implications for educational contexts. Recent research has revealed that watching or even creating TikToks in classrooms can aid learning objectives, particularly relating to language acquisition or narrative writing skills. In this post, I discuss the conventions of and consequences for TikToks that discuss college writing. Because of the popularity of videos that spotlight “how-tos” or “day in the life” style content, looking at essay or college writing TikTok can be a helpful tool for understanding some larger trends and student perceptions of writing. Due to the instructional nature of TikToks and the ways that students might be using the app for advice, these videos can be viewed as parallel or ancillary to the advice that a Writing Center tutor might provide.

pull quote reads, "There is a ready audience for content that purports to assist writers in meeting the deliverables of a writing assignment using a path of least resistance."

A search for common hashtags including the words “essay,” “college writing,” or “essay writing hack” yields hundreds of videos that pertain to writing at the college level. Although there is a large variety in content due to the sheer amount of content, this post focuses on two genres of videos as they represent a large portion of what is shared: first, videos that provide tips or how-tos for certain AI tools or assignment genres and second, videos that invite the viewer to accompany the creator as they write a paper under a deadline. Shared themes include attempts to establish peer connections and comfort viewers who procrastinate while writing, a focus on writing speed and concrete deliverables (page count, word limit, or hours to write), and an emphasis on digital tools or AI software (especially that which is marked as “not cheating”). Not only does a closer examination into these videos help us meet writers where they are more precisely, but it also draws writing center workers’ attention to lesser known digital tools or “hacks” that students are using for their assignments.

“How to write” Videos

Videos in the “how to” style are instructional and advice-dispensing in tone. Often, the creator utilizes a digital writing aid or provides a set of writing tips or steps to follow. Whether these videos spotlight assistive technologies that use AI, helpful websites, or suggestions for specific forms of writing, they often position writing as a roadblock or adversary. Videos of this nature attempt to reach viewers by promising to make writing easier, more approachable, or just faster when working under a tight deadline; they almost always assume the writer in question has left their writing task to the last possible moment. It’s not surprising then that the most widely shared examples of this form of content are videos with titles like “How to speed-write long papers” or “How to make any essay longer” (this one has 32 million views). It is evident that this type of content attempts to target students who suffer from writing-related anxiety or who tend to procrastinate while writing.

Sharing “hacks” online is a common practice that manifests in many corners of TikTok where content creators demonstrate an easier or more efficient way of achieving a task (such as loading a dishwasher) or obtaining a result (such as finding affordable airline tickets). The same principle applies to #essay TikTok, where writing advice is often framed as a “hack” for writing faster papers, longer papers, or papers more likely to result in an A. This content uses a familiar titling convention: How to write X (where X might be a specific genre like a literature review, or just an amount of pages or words); How to write X in X amount of time; and How to write X using this software or AI program. The amount of time is always tantalizingly brief, as two examples—“How to write a 5 page essay in 2 mins” and “How to write an essay in five minutes!! NO PLAGIARISM!!”—attest to. While some of these are silly or no longer useful methods of getting around assignment parameters, they introduce viewers to helpful research and writing aids and sometimes even spotlight Writing Center best practices. For instance, a video by creator @kaylacp called “Research Paper Hack” shows viewers how to use a program called PowerNotes to organize and code sources; a video by @patches has almost seven million views and demonstrates using an AI bot to both grade her paper and provide substantive feedback. Taken as a whole, this subsect of TikTok underscores that there is a ready audience for content that purports to assist writers in meeting the deliverables of a writing assignment using a path of least resistance.

Black background with white text that reads “How to Make AI Essay Sound Like You…”

Similarly, TikTok contains myriad videos that position the creator as a sort of expert in college writing and dispense tips for improving academic writing and style. These videos are often created by upperclassmen who claim to frequently receive As on essays and tend to use persuasive language in the style of an infomercial, such as “How to write a college paper like a pro,” “How to write research papers more efficiently in 5 easy steps!” or “College students, if you’re not using this feature, you’re wasting your time.” The focus in these videos is even more explicit than those mentioned above, as college students are addressed in the titles and captions directly. This is significant because it prompts users to engage with this content as they might with a Writing Center tutor or tutoring more generally. These videos are sites where students are learning how to write more efficiently but also learning how their college peers view and treat the writing process.

The “how to write” videos share several common themes, most prevalent of which is an emphasis on concrete deliverables—you will be able to produce this many pages in this many minutes. They also share a tendency to introduce or spotlight different digital tools and assistive technologies that make writing more expedient; although several videos reference or demonstrate how to use ChatGPT or OpenAI, most creators attempt to show viewers less widely discussed platforms and programs. As parallel forms of writing instruction, these how-tos tend to focus on quantity over quality and writing-as-product. However, they also showcase ways that AI can be helpful and generative for writers at all stages. Most notably they direct our attention to the fact that student writers consistently encounter writing- and essay- related content while scrolling TikTok.

Write “with me” Videos

Just as the how-to style videos target writers who view writing negatively and may have a habit of procrastinating writing assignments, write “with me” videos invite the viewer to join the creator as they work. These videos almost always include a variation of the phrase— “Write a 5- page case analysis w/ me” or “pull an all nighter with me while I write a 10- page essay.” One of the functions of this convention is to establish a peer-to-peer connection with the viewer, as they are brought along while the creator writes, experiences writer’s block, takes breaks, but ultimately completes their assignment in time. Similarly to the videos discussed above, these “with me” videos also center on writing under a deadline and thus emphasize the more concrete deliverables of their assignments. As such, the writing process is often made less visible in favor of frequent cuts and timestamps that show the progression toward a page or word count goal.

young white man sitting at a computer with a filter on his face and text above hm that reads “Me writing a 500 word essay for class:”

One of the most common effects of “with me” videos is to assure the viewer that procrastinating writing is part and parcel of the college experience. As the content creators grapple with and accept their own writing anxieties or deferring habits, they demonstrate for the viewer that it is possible to be both someone who struggles with writing and someone who can make progress on their papers. In this way, these videos suggest to students that they are not alone in their experiences; not only do other college students feel overwhelmed with writing or leave their papers until the day before they are due, but you can join a fellow student as they tackle the essay writing process. One popular video by @mercuryskid with over 6 million views follows them working on a 6000 word essay for which they have received several extensions, and although they don’t finish by the end of the video, their openness about the struggles they experience while writing may explain its appeal.

Indeed, in several videos of this kind the creator centers their procrastination as a means of inviting the viewer in; often the video will include the word in the title, such as “write 2 essays due at 11:59 tonight with me because I am a chronic procrastinator” or “write the literature essay i procrastinated with me.” Because of this, establishing a peer connection with the hypothetical viewer is paramount; @itskamazing’s video in which she writes a five page paper in three hours ends with her telling the viewer, “If you’re in college, you’re doing great. Let’s just knock this semester out.” One video titled “Writing essays doesn’t need to be stressful” shows a college-aged creator explaining what tactics she uses for outlining and annotating research to make sure she feels prepared when she begins to write in earnest. Throughout, she directly hails the viewer as “you” and attempts to cultivate a sense of familiarity with the person on the other side of the screen; in some moments her advice feels like listening in on a one-sided Writing Center session.

pull quote reads, "These videos suggest to students that they are not alone in their experiences; not only do other college students feel overwhelmed with writing or leave their papers until the day before they are due, but you can join a fellow student as they tackle the essay writing process."

A second aspect of these “with me” videos is an intense focus on the specifics of a writing task. The titles of these videos usually follow a formula that invites the viewer with the writer as they write X amount in X time, paralleling the structure of how-to-write videos. The emphasis here, due to the last-minute nature of the writing contexts, is always on speed: “write a 2000- word essay with me in 4.5 hours” or “Join me as I write a 10- page essay that is due at 11:59pm.” Since these videos often need to cover large swaths of time during which the creator is working, there are several jumps forward in time, sped up footage, and text stamps or zoom-ins that update the viewer on how many pages or words the writer has completed since the last update. Overall, this brand of content demonstrates how product-focused writers become when large amounts of writing are completed in a single setting. However, it also makes this experience seem more manageable to viewers, as we frequently see writers in videos take naps and breaks during these high-stakes writing sessions. Furthermore, although the writers complain and appear stressed throughout, these videos tend to close with the writer submitting their papers and celebrating their achievement.

Although these videos may send mixed messages to college students using TikTok who experience struggles with writing productivity, they can be helpful for viewers as they demonstrate the shared nature of these struggles and concerns. Despite the overarching emphasis on the finished product, the documentary-style of this content shows how writing can be a fraught process. For tutors or those removed from the experience of being in college, these videos also illuminate some of the reasons students procrastinate writing; we see creators juggling part-time jobs, other due dates, and family obligations. This genre of TikToks shows the power that social media platforms have due to the way they can amplify the shared experience of students.

pull quote reads, "@itskamazing’s video . . . ends with her telling the viewer, 'If you’re in college, you’re doing great. Let’s just knock this semester out.'"

To conclude, I gesture toward a few of the takeaways that #essay and #collegewriting TikTok might provide for those who work in Writing Centers, especially those who frequently encounter students who struggle with procrastination. First, because TikTok is a video-sharing platform, the content often shows a mixture of writing process and product. Despite a heavy emphasis in these videos on the finished product that a writer turns in to be graded, several videos necessarily also reveal the steps that go into writing, even marathon sessions the night before a paper is due. We primarily see forward progress but we also see false starts and deletions; we mostly see the writer once they have completed pre-writing tasks but we also see analyzing a prompt, outlining, and brainstorming. Additionally, this genre of TikTok is instructive in that it shows how often students wait until before a paper is due to begin and just how many writers are working solely to meet a deadline or deliverable. While as Writing Center workers we cannot do much to shift this mindset, we can make a more considerable effort to focus on time management and executive functioning skills in our sessions. Separating the essay writing process into manageable chunks or steps appears to be a skill that college students are already seeking to develop independently when they engage on social media, and Writing Centers are equipped to help students refine these habits. Finally, it is worth considering the potential for university Writing Center TikTok accounts. A brief survey of videos created by Writing Center staff reveals that they draw on similar themes and tend to emphasize product and deliverables—for example, a video titled “a passing essay grade” that shows someone going into the center and receiving an A+ on a paper. Instead, these accounts could create a space for Writing Centers to actively contribute to the discourse on college writing that currently occupies the app and create content that parallels a specific Writing Center or campus’s values.

Holly Berkowitz is the Coordinator of the Writing and Communication Center at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She recently received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she also worked at the UW-Madison Writing Center. Although she does not post her own content, she is an avid consumer of TikTok videos.

On Your Screen: The Rise of Film TikTok

How to find the best video essays

Haya kaylani curates video essay recommendations in her newsletter “the deep dive.”.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

Can you tell I’m starting to think about making video essays? — Kate

How to find the newsletter that will tell you about newsletters finding video essays:

Take one quick look at what’s trending on YouTube, and you can easily lose faith in humanity. As I write this, it’s all Grimace shakes and people either giving or spending thousands of dollars for different viral stunts.

But underneath all that, a genre of creators is playing a long game. Video essays might seem totally incompatible with today’s internet of fast short-form content and flashy clickbait. But inexplicably, hours-long videos on topics ranging from modern femininity to the history of Disney’s FastPass system consistently receive millions of views. The genre is becoming so popular that people like Haya Kaylani have emerged to help viewers sort through it.

Kidology’s video essays will renew your faith in social media

Kaylani writes The Deep Dive , a newsletter in which she curates five video essay recommendations every week, although I discovered her on TikTok , where her videos highlighting recent stand-out essays have received millions of views of their own.

Kaylani worked in the PR industry for six years, but after she lost her job in a round of layoffs, she was inspired to try something new. She had been a longtime consumer of video essays, but no one in her IRL friend group was interested in them.

“They weren't anything that I could talk about with my friends or the people in my life,” she says over Zoom. “But every time I would watch these videos, I noticed that they would have hundreds of thousands of views, if not millions. So it was this feeling of like, ‘Okay, they're out there. People are watching these.’”

The Deep Dive has since gained over 6,500 subscribers since it launched in February of this year, and another nearly 57,000 follow it on TikTok. In this interview for paid subscribers, Kaylani and I talk about the video essay explosion, how TikTok is (ironically) boosting long-form content, and where people should get started if they, too, want to become video essay obsessives.

What’s the appeal of a video essay versus a written essay?

This post is for paid subscribers

TikTok: Impact on Human Creativity Essay

To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
As a template for you assignment

TikTok is a short-form video platform with user-generated content where billions of people post their creative ideas. It boosts communication, provides knowledge and entertainment, and affects the human lifestyle. However, this app elicits criticism from people who believe that, despite its benefits to the lives of humans, it is stifling their creativity and wasting time. The idea that technology is the parasite of creativity has been argued several times since various individuals have different perspectives on this claim. Nevertheless, Tiktok is a revolutionary gift that, when utilized well, stimulates creativity while delivering visual pieces of information and hinders creativity when not used appropriately.

The earliest effects of TikTok on individuality started from the first moment of its launch in 2012. Although Chinese developers initially created this app and named it Musical.ly for mimicking and lip-syncing, it turned out to be a more meaningful platform (Tucker, 2020). The reason is that in 2017 TikTok became popular in the US by being downloaded 80 million times. This obsession attracted new app owners that changed its name and focus, making it more relevant for the sizeable audience where many artists could launch their careers. Artificial intelligence facilitates its success, ensuring users watch only desired videos based on an algorithm and attracting more than a million Gen Z and Gen Alpha individuals (Qiyang and Hung, 2019). Today it is an app for people who enjoy videos of comedy, animal tricks, and helpful information edited by amateurs and professional graphic designers.

Some arguments in favor of TikTok’s positive effect assert that it enhances self-expression since it offers information, and information does not inhibit human creativity. It is reinforced by the notion that individuals still need creativity to comprehend and intervene in the app’s data. More importantly, TikTok does not promote the picture-perfectness of Instagram, daily routines on Twitter, or long videos on YouTube (Qiyang and Hung, 2019). Instead, in this social media, natural, be it excellent or ugly, video content comes first, which destroys all borders limiting human creativity. Since people use the platform to celebrate being themselves, demonstrating that no one is perfect, it allows users to use self-humor creatively (Chu et al., 2022). If people rarely post their outright stories on Instagram, they do not hide any exciting information in TikTok because the audience always welcomes unusual experiences and perspectives there.

Another critical feature of TikTok that attracts an audience is its accessibility, meaning everyone can deliver their message. Even the general concept of TikTok justifies that people can do amazing things to compete for the audience if provided with a new platform and tools. Such people prove that TikTok is extending the possibilities of visual arts such as graphic design, music creation, and filmmaking by potentially encouraging more individuals to join the creative community. For example, Jason Derulo’s TikTok profile is full of slow-motion videos and highly edited productions, which makes him a part of the online community (Kenitz, 2021). Even after gaining enough popularity, content creators must post creative videos and interact with the audiences to grab them. Thus, the increasing success of the platform proves that it fosters creative potential where the videos on TikTok become the source of global imagination.

However, such advanced opportunities provided by TikTok to connect users from various backgrounds with realistic stories make content creators worry more about their creativity. It becomes more challenging to generate compelling ideas in a competitive social media like TikTok since app owners put limitations on the posted videos. For instance, influencers and communication designers should maximize their imagination and utilize better video visuals and filters to provide more compelling content in 60 seconds (Chu et al., 2022). They stand out from the rest as long as they put more effort and time into each video. Success in TikTok requires users to rely on softwares utilized by graphic and communication designers to generate high-quality videos. Most of them never completed cinematography studies but succeeded due to many failures, long experiments, and vital creativity.

Some people oppose TikTok, believing in its negative effects because adults are engrossed in the platform that needs more innovative activities that may foster creativity. When people spend all their free time gadget scrolling instead of physically engaging in games, sports, or recreational activities, they impede imagination. Obsession with TikTok is why people refuse to complete their daily tasks (Lawson, 2022). Thus, the lifestyle of couch potatoes with electronic devices in their hands is proof of consumerism rather than creativity.

Another reason TikTok limits creativity relates to the content published on the platform. Since creativity is about being authentic and generating innovative ideas, an existing algorithm that promotes videos with “optimized hashtags, video length, and the time at which the video is posted” (Lawson, 2022, para. 8). Hence, it becomes almost impossible to consider somebody creative if he constantly thinks inside the platform’s checkbox. Moreover, many duplicates with the same message and content steal ideas from other TikTok profiles, meaning that users posting videos cannot create original products. It happens because some trends on social media have become popular, so it is impossible to neglect them. It is how the posts that intended to highlight the originality of some groups become over-popularized trends.

The points mentioned above highlight that TikTok can enhance and inhibit human creativity. Finding a balance between two extremes is critical to foster imagination. When people do not spend all day scrolling through their feeds, they have enough time for physical and mental activities stimulating their creativity. Regarding content creators, they should learn to provide their ideas and visual arts to grab an audience instead of copying their competitors. If the initial concept of the platform requiring people to be realistic about their thoughts and experiences remains, there will be enough outstanding creators with authentic styles. Since TikTok brings everything within reach to the point where people no longer strain their minds to figure out how to make something available, engaging with the audience to find standard solutions could be helpful for creativity. The most vital aspect is sharing ideas, talking, and exchanging views when individuals congregate in a room instead of watching TikTok videos.

To conclude, TikTok is a video platform with billions of users worldwide enjoying funny and helpful content. It stifles human creativity by requiring individuals to spend all their time on electronics, making everything accessible, copying everyone, and fitting into TikTok’s promotional algorithm. However, it also fosters visual arts and imagination by providing valuable information and exciting tools and encouraging people to be honest. Nevertheless, it is possible to control the use of TikTok to compensate for the lack of uniqueness and substance. If people learn to post authentic ideas, limit time spent online, and utilize TikTok to their advantage, global trends of passive consumerism shift to creativity.

Reference List

Chu, S. C., Deng, T., and Mundel, J. (2022) “ The impact of personalization on viral behavior intentions on TikTok: The role of perceived creativity, authenticity, and need for uniqueness ,” Journal of Marketing Communications , 2(1), pp. 1-20. Web.

Kenitz, D. (2021) “ 13 TikTok starts and how they rose to fam ,” Skillshare Blog . Web.

Lawson, L. (2022) “ Art and algorithms: How TikTok is threatening creativity ,” The Boar , Web.

Qiyang, Z. and Jung, H. (2019) “Learning and sharing creative skills with short videos: A case study of user behavior in tiktok and bilibili,” International Association of Societies of Design research, 5(2), pp. 1–15. Web.

Tucker, J. A. (2020) “ What brilliant TikTok reveals about human creativity ,” American Institute for Economic Research, Web.

Effect of Social Media on Junior and High School
U.S. Government's Recent Ban on Chinese Firm TikTok
Social Media and Change of Society
Twitter and Facebook: The Core Competencies
Oreo’s Social Media Strategies to Maximize Online Presence
Social Media Monitoring and Analysis
Instagram: Promotion of Loneliness
The Hidden Influence of Social Networks
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IvyPanda. (2024, May 28). TikTok: Impact on Human Creativity. https://ivypanda.com/essays/tiktok-impact-on-human-creativity/

"TikTok: Impact on Human Creativity." IvyPanda , 28 May 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/tiktok-impact-on-human-creativity/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'TikTok: Impact on Human Creativity'. 28 May.

IvyPanda . 2024. "TikTok: Impact on Human Creativity." May 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/tiktok-impact-on-human-creativity/.

1. IvyPanda . "TikTok: Impact on Human Creativity." May 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/tiktok-impact-on-human-creativity/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "TikTok: Impact on Human Creativity." May 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/tiktok-impact-on-human-creativity/.

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Why this Harvard-bound Brockton student's college admissions essay went viral on TikTok

BROCKTON — Abigail Mack lost her mother, Julie, to cancer when she was just 12 years old.

The Cardinal Spellman High School valedictorian used that experience to write her college admissions essay, which went viral on TikTok for her heartfelt words. It also got her into her dream school, Harvard University.

Mack, a Bridgewater resident, wrote about the challenges she faced growing up with one parent and living in a world constructed for two-parent families.

"I hate the letter 'S,'" Mack started her essay. "Of the 164,777 words with 'S,' I only grapple with one. To condemn an entire letter because of its use 0.0006 percent of the time sounds statistically absurd, but that one case changed 100 percent of my life.

"I used to have two parents, but now I have one, and the 'S' in parents isn't going anywhere. 'S' follows me. I can't get through a day without being reminded that while my friends went out to dinner with their parents, I ate with my parent. As I write this essay, there is a blue line under the word 'parent,' telling me to check my grammar; even Grammarly assumes that I should have parents, but cancer doesn't listen to edit suggestions."

Mack read the introduction to her Common App essay in a May 3 TikTok video . The initial video has been viewed 17 million times as of Thursday. It has been "liked" 4.7 million times.

"I see why you got in," one TikTok commenter wrote.

"WOW," another user wrote.

Mack went on to share additional parts of her essay in a four-part video series.

The 18-year-old said she tried to abandon "S, " because the world wouldn't. Mack tried to stay busy because "you can't have dinner with your 'parent' (thanks again Grammarly) if you're too busy to have family dinner."

Mack filled all her spare time and said she became known as the "busy kid." She played volleyball, took dance classes, participated in theater and did other after-school activities. Mack said certain themes — academics, theater and politics — kept coming up in her life and she found her rhythm and embraced it .

"I stopped running away from a single 'S' and began chasing a double 'S' — paSSion," Mack wrote. "Passion has given me purpose. I was shackled to 'S' as I tried to escape the confines of the traditional familial structure."

Mack was also accepted into other prestigious colleges, including Dartmouth College, Georgetown University and the University of Notre Dame.

Her viral TikTok video has now gained national attention, with a trending BuzzFeed story about her essay reaching more than 725,000 views as of Thursday morning.

"Despite all obstacles, Abigail has found incredible success at Cardinal Spellman High School and outside of it as well on the stage in Boston Theater and even as part of the re-election campaign for Senator Ed Markey," Cardinal Spellman said in a statement. "She continues to excel in sports and academics here at Spellman, earning the title of Valedictorian for the class of 2021. Her recent success and acceptance into Harvard comes as no surprise to her friends, family and Cardinal Spellman mentors!"

Mack's father, Jonathan, continues to run Julie's Studio of Dance in West Bridgewater, which Julie Mack opened just months before her death at the age of 39 in 2014 . Julie Mack had battled cancer since she was 14 years old.

Mack will enter Harvard in the fall as an undecided major, but she's considering pursuing a focus in foreign policy.

Enterprise senior reporter Cody Shepard can be reached by email at [email protected] . You can follow him on Twitter at @cshepard_ENT . Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Enterprise today.

Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — TikTok — The Impact of TikTok on Society and Culture

The Impact of Tiktok on Society and Culture

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Published: Sep 6, 2023

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Redefining entertainment, fostering creativity and expression, challenges to traditional media, social and cultural trends, conclusion: a cultural force.

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Looking at the year’s notable video essays, many grapple with issues at the heart of contemporary media itself. There are dissections of video-playing tools, exposés of how corporations restrict access, contrasts between tropes and reality, and thorough investigations of trends in plagiarism and/or fabrication. As the essay landscape refines, it seems to peer inward as much as out.

On the making of this list: I’ve been trying to stay up to date on video essays for a while, and have been contributing to lists and/or voting in polls about the best videos made each year since 2018. Over this time, doing these kinds of roundups has gotten exponentially more difficult. As YouTube has grown to become a mega-business hosting powerful creators (part of the general trend of social media video sites becoming the new primary forum for cultural influence), I’ve seen essayists I once thought of as niche accrue follower counts in the millions. It’s been surreal. For this year’s list, I tried to shake things up by keeping the essayists who have appeared in previous editions to a minimum, along with the usual considerations about incorporating a diversity of creator backgrounds and video style. Once again, the videos are presented simply in order of publishing date.

[Also, I’m going to preface this with a mega mea culpa: It was absolute malpractice of me to not include Platformer Toolkit by Game Maker’s Toolkit in the best video essays of 2022 list . I don’t have a good excuse, either; I just straight up missed the essay at the time it came out, and then overlooked it during my catch-up phase at the end of the year. But an essay about game design that instructs you on its ideas by letting you actively engage with them through interactivity feels like a breakthrough in the form.]

Practices of Viewing by Johannes Binotto

Johannes Binotto is a Swiss researcher and lecturer who has been adding to his “Practices of Viewing” series for several years now, and every installment preceding 2023’s videos, “Ending” and “Description,” is well worth checking out. With each essay, Binotto examines a specific element of the media viewing interface, and how they affect an audience’s engagement with it. Some subjects, like fast-forwarding, pausing, or muting, may seem like obvious touchstones, while others, like sleep, are more out-there approaches to the conversation.

A History of the World According to Getty Images by Richard Misek

This technically debuted last year, making the rounds at film festivals, but it was made available online this past spring, so I’m including it here. A History of the World According to Getty Images is a great example of a work embedding its own ethos into its construction. Misek, another academic, is scrutinizing how for-profit companies (specifically Getty Images) mediate information that’s supposed to be available for all. In practice, a great deal of visual material that’s technically in the public domain can only be accessed in decent quality by paying an archive like Getty. Misek circumvents this by paying the fee to use select footage in this essay and then making this essay itself available for anyone to cite and clip from, putting that footage out into the world for real.

The Faces of Black Conservatism by F.D Signifier

I feel that video essays that consist mainly of the creator talking directly into a camera stretch the definition of the term – to me, the best cinematic and argumentative potential of the form lies in the power of editing. F.D Signifier’s contrast between fictional depictions of Black conservatives and the reality of how they appear across media exemplifies is what sets him apart in this genre: not just the depth of his thought (though it is considerable), but also the playful ways in which he presents the objects of his discussion. The running gag here in which he films himself holding hairstyling tools over the heads of various people on his screen had me laughing harder with each appearance.

Games That Don’t Fake the Space by Jacob Geller/Why We Can’t Stop Mapping Elden Ring by Ren or Raven

I don’t actually think this is the best essay Jacob Geller released this year (that would be either “Games that Aren’t Games” or “How Can We Bear to Throw Anything Away?” ), but it pairs so incredibly well with Renata Price’s essay (an impressive video debut building on her experience as a games critic) that it felt more appropriate to present them as a double feature. Both videos are sharp examinations of the ways that video games conjure physical space. Geller illuminates the shortcuts and tricks games often employ through examples of ones that, as the title suggests, don’t use such devices, while Price analyzes the impulses beneath what one could call the “cartographic instinct” in open-world games.

Why Do Brands Keep Doing These Crazy Influencer Trips?? by Mina Le

It’s been encouraging in recent years to see Le grow more confident in her mixing of media in her videos on fashion and film/television. You might remember the controversy around Shein granting influencers a limited hangout in a clothing factory this past summer. Le contextualizes this story by delving into the wider, supremely odd world of sponsored tours. If you watch this on your phone, the transitions between Le speaking to the camera and the clips of TikToks and other videos and photos flow together in a manner not unlike how one would scroll a social media feed, creating queasy resonance between message and medium.

Feeling Cynical About Barbie by Broey Deschanel / The Plastic Feminism of Barbie by Verilybitchie

I present these two videos not as a contrarian attack on Barbie (a film I enjoyed), but to highlight the important role of considered critical voices that dissent against prevailing opinions. Both Maia Wyman and Verity Ritchie unpack the issues with a heavily corporate product attempting to capitalize on feminist sentiment. Ritchie emphasizes the history of Barbie the brand and how the movie fits into it, while Wyman reads more into the specifics of the film’s plot. Together these videos do a good job of elaborating on legendary critic Amy Taubin’s Barbie reaction : “It’s about a fucking doll !’”

TikTok Gave Me Autism: The Politics of Self Diagnosis by Alexander Avila

There’s a lot of social media discourse over who can and can’t — and should or shouldn’t — claim the label of “autistic.” As someone who’s struggled with both the logistics and appropriateness of sussing out whether I’m on the spectrum, this video hit me hard. There are parts that feel like they veer so far into philosophical query that they threaten to obfuscate rather than elucidate the subject, but the essay as a whole is undeniably compelling. Avila’s own confessed stake in the question of self-diagnosis is itself affecting. This is the most searingly personal video on this list, uniting self-inquiry with rigorous research.

Chaste/Unchaste by Maryam Tafakory

This years shortest entry is a deceptively simple interrogation of the concept of “chastity” as defined by Iranian censorship standards. Takafory is a veteran of the academic essay scene, and I’m delighted by the opportunity to present her work to a wider audience. The video’s text is minimal, and its visuals are simply a montage of clips from Iranian films, but the implicit question of propriety grips the viewer with each cut.

Journey to Epcot Center: A Symphonic History by Defunctland

This is the most boundary-pushing essay on this year’s list. Completely lacking commentary, it instead emphasizes visuals and reenactment in telling the story of how Disney’s Epcot park went from concept to realization over the decades. Kevin Perjurer also provides a detailed set of notes that are meant to be read along with watching the video, further demanding one’s full attention. This is a direct acknowledgement of how we use the internet, the windowed experience of browsing and watching videos. I don’t think everything works; many of the reenactments, while impressively professional, feel somewhat redundant. But I’d prefer a creator take big swings that result in a few flaws rather than play it safe, and I hope both Perjurer and others continue in such an experimental vein.

Plagiarism and You(Tube) by Hbomberguy

Harry Brewis is popular enough that he doesn’t need any boost, but even in the very brief period since this video’s release as of the time of writing, Plagiarism and You(Tube) has made seismic impact on the YouTuber scene . Does it need to be almost four hours long? Maybe not. Yet the sheer volume of evidence it pulls together to support various accusations of plagiarism does seem vital. The main focus of the piece, James Somerton, went into lockdown over the fairly comprehensive evidence presented against him (and has since attempted to apologize ). I’m seeing conversations flourish around the endemic problem of plagiarism on the internet and what is to be done about it, and a surge of creators recognizing and calling out others who have taken their work without credit. There’s a deeper issue at play here, which is that the growth of YouTube entertainment has come with a truly daunting mountain of crap content that nonetheless attracts views (and thus dollars).

On the subject of low quality standards on YouTube, beyond plagiarism, Todd in the Shadows’ recent exhaustive effort to fact-check various false claims Somerton has made in his work is a useful supplement to this video.

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We’re in a Golden Era of Video Essays and That Is Awesome

Exclusive content curated for Create: All things pre-production to post. See trends and topics like this and more come to life at NAB Show in Las Vegas. Explore the latest tools and advanced workflows elevating the art of storytelling.

The cultural impact a creator has is already surpassing that of traditional media, but there’s still a stark imbalance of power between proprietary platforms and the creators who use them. Discover what it takes to stay ahead of the game with these fresh insights hand-picked from the NAB Amplify archives:

The Developer’s Role in Building the Creator Economy Is More Important Than You Think
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Is the Creator Economy Really a Democratic Utopia Realized?

YouTube creator Tiffany Ferguson admits to feeling some pressure from audiences to make her videos longer.

“I’ve seen comments, both on my own videos and those I watch, where fans are like, ‘Yes, you’re feeding us,’ when it comes to longer videos, especially the hour to two-hour ones. In a way, the mentality seems to be: The longer the better.”

In a Medium post, “ We Live in the Golden Age of Video Essays ,” blogger A. Khaled remarked that viewers were “willing to indulge user-generated content that is as long as a multi-million dollar cinematic production by a major Hollywood studio” — a notion that seemed improbable just a few years ago, even to the most popular video essayists. To creators, this hunger for well-edited, long-form video is unprecedented and uniquely suited to pandemic times.

Are you interested in contributing ideas, suggestions or opinions? We’d love to hear from you. Email us here .

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Krystal reports on venture capital and startups for Reuters. She covers Silicon Valley and beyond through the lens of money and characters, with a focus on growth-stage startups, tech investments and AI. She has previously covered M&A for Reuters, breaking stories on Trump's SPAC and Elon Musk's Twitter financing. Previously, she reported on Amazon for Yahoo Finance, and her investigation of the company's retail practice was cited by lawmakers in Congress. Krystal started a career in journalism by writing about tech and politics in China. She has a master's degree from New York University, and enjoys a scoop of Matcha ice cream as much as getting a scoop at work.

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I Went to a Viral TikTok Medium to Connect With My Dead Mother

I've always been what some may call "woo-woo." I'm a self-identified crystal girlie, another 20-something on her spiritual journey, and yes, if given the opportunity, I will take every tarot card reading ever presented to me. So, naturally, when my estranged mom passed away in early 2019, I started considering what some folks might consider an unconventional option: hiring a medium to connect with her in the afterlife.

For quite some time, however, I didn't know where to look . . . until last year. I was scrolling through my For You page on TikTok, when I came across Amie Balesky, a spiritual medium who's amassed a cool three million followers under her account, The Balesky . Known for connecting people with lost spirits and the dead, her bio reads, "Helping Spirits & People since 1995."

Balesky's page is full of clips from virtual readings with folks around the world. In them, she's answering questions about the afterlife, offering helpful life advice, and of course, connecting lost loved ones with their living family and friends. I immediately reached out to Balesky's team and booked a session six months out — which, for one of the top-rated mediums in the Northern hemisphere, is pretty standard.

When the day finally came, I was so excited. Nervous, too. This was my chance to connect with my mother: the woman who didn't get to raise me, who left my life for 11 years, who missed out on so much in her own existence because of her long 32-year battle with methamphetamine addiction. It was my chance to say and hear all the things I never got to.

Before my hour-long session, I received instructions from Balesky: seek out a calm space for the session, spend the days before and after asking the spirit to come forward, and write down any questions you may want to ask.

It's important to note that, before my session, the only thing Balesky had asked from me was the name of the person I was trying to reach. I didn't share any identifying factors about my mother or myself; she didn't know my age, my mom's age, how she died, my story, or anything that could have led her to certain conclusions.

Before I knew it, it was my time. Upon joining the call, I'm greeted by Balesky, who emanates a positive energy and makes me smile. She doesn't seem much different than the woman I had seen on TikTok, which is reassuring, and she sits in a witchy-looking room that feels oddly comforting: the walls are a dark shade of purple, lighting is low, and candles flicker on tables behind her.

Balesky explains how the process of channeling works for her. Spirits communicate through her, using her brain like a computer, and according to her, they can show her images, make her feel emotions, and even emit words or phrases to get messages across to the living. She also shows me a notebook, which she uses to scribble on, while she channels.

Then, the channeling begins.

"I see an image of you crying . . . maybe five years ago," Balesky says. "Are you with someone now but you were with someone else five years ago?" Yes, I had been: five years ago, I was with my ex-husband, and moved to New York City, before meeting my current husband.

"There's a few people here. You had a man come in for a second but he went away and now, there's a woman. Oh, she keeps saying 'mom,' 'mother,' 'mom.'" I smile, happy my mom decided to show up for me now, when I asked her.

My mom died of an overdose, but I hadn't told Balesky that. "Did your mom die of . . . oh, she's saying, 'janky medication,'" Balesky says. Ah, yes, janky medication. Balesky gestures that my mom is shaking a pill bottle, and taking one, and then another, and then a third. "It's not a good combination," mom says. No shit, it's not.

Balesky correctly notes that my mom and dad weren't together when my mom passed. My parents had been in an on-again-off-again relationship for most of my life before ending things fully in 2004. They were extremely toxic to each other . "He's a pain in my ass," mom says. That makes me laugh because Balesky uses the exact tone my mother would have used. It makes the hair on my arm stand up.

"Your mom says," Balesky smiles, "'I am the one that made them meet.'" My mom is referring to my husband and me. It's funny: my husband is definitely skeptical of the spiritual, but lately, he's been saying that being with me makes him believe in magic. He often says that he thinks my mom sent him to me, even though she died before we got together. Whenever I do my spiritual routine, like tarot cards or meditation and journaling, he says he sees us talking.

Balesky adds, "She keeps saying 'Rob' or 'Robby' or 'Robert.' Do you know anyone by that name?" This is when I feel tears form. Robert was my mom's ex-boyfriend, who left her because he got sober, and she didn't. I met him for the first time at her funeral; he came up to me and introduced himself, and said that my mom never stopped loving me despite our estrangement.

"Oh, she also seems mad," Balesky says. "She just said, 'Robert's probably screwing some other girl.' Your mom seems to hate men. I like your mom, she's funny." OK, yeah, that's also true. It makes me laugh out loud. I smile because it's just so her.

"Was she cremated? She's saying, 'Don't put me in the closet, put me out in the living room.' She wants to be out with you," Balesky says. My mom had indeed been cremated. When I first moved to New York City, I left her ashes in a closet at my dad's house before bringing them home with me. They've been sitting in my apartment living room for four years.

"Are you writing a book?" Balesky asks. "She's showing me you writing and putting pictures of her in the book. She says, 'I don't know why she's using all those pictures.' But she also likes it." I am writing a book about her actually: a memoir on addiction, love, and how it can exist even in the most painful moments. I'm halfway through.

"She's proud of you, she keeps showing me you getting measured for a pant suit — maybe it's for the book launch or something," Balesky says. "She's also showing me you and her sitting together at a cafe table. She's holding your hand. For me, that means she wants to be close." I want to be close, too.

Balesky adds, "Oh, she just showed you coming home and putting the keys on the counter. 'Hi baby,' your mom says. She's showing me you with a dog, a little wiry-haired dog with a squished face." Hi baby: when I was little, my mom would greet me that way in the exact tone that Balesky just used. My heart feels like it could burst. Oh, and as for the dog, I'm getting a brussels griffon this summer.

"She just said, 'I would use her when I could,' like manipulate you to get what she wanted. Is that true?" Balesky asks. Yes, it's why we were estranged, and why we couldn't have a relationship that was healthy or good.

"Now, you should know I see her on top of you. Her spirit, I mean," Balesky says. "She knows that now, she owes it to be with you and guide you, like she couldn't when she was alive." Maybe that's why I feel her around all the time now. It seems like she's always showing me herself somehow.

There's so much more that's said. The hour, which goes by in the blink of an eye, leaves me feeling tingly and emotional. I feel like a part of me is opened that I hadn't seen or felt for years. I can hear and feel my mom around.

Balesky's ability to channel feels brilliant and unprompted, like she knows things she could have never known unless my mom had really spoken through her. It feels undeniably real; I believe it is. It reminds me of the way some folks describe religion as a belief in something we cannot see, but we know is really there. I notice a lingering sensation after the session — like somehow my mom is hugging me from the beyond.

Before Balesky says goodbye, she smiles. In my mom's voice, I hear her say, "I love you, I'm sorry."

Hayley Folk (she/her) is a freelance writer, editor, and podcast host based in New York City. She is the host of the "Naked Folk" podcast — a sexual wellness and relationships podcast — and she writes for major publications about the LGBTQ+ community, travel, lifestyle, sex, and wellness. In 2022, she received her master of fine arts in creative writing from The New School.

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Why Long-Form TikTok Videos Make Perfect Sense

By Robert Steiner

Robert Steiner

Why Long-Form TikTok Videos Make Perfect Sense 1 week ago
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TikTok’s push to long-form social video may be surprising, considering that its vertical short-form video model has since been copied by most social media platforms, from Instagram to YouTube to even LinkedIn . But despite the crowded field and a U.S. ban possibly on the horizon, TikTok still handedly commands user attention.

In January 2023, eMarketer found that TikTok passed YouTube in daily average social video time spent by users in 2022, hitting 52 minutes to YouTube’s 46. By December, it predicted TikTokers would average 55 minutes of daily time spent on the app — about 5 minutes higher than YouTube users and even encroaching on Netflix’s average.

Still, YouTube Shorts has proven to be a worthy adversary to TikTok less than four years since its launch. In 2023 alone, Shorts users crossed the 2 billion mark and accumulated upward of 50 billion views a day. This upward trajectory is even more notable given that TikTok’s user growth had slowed dramatically by the end of 2023.

In an ironic twist, YouTube may now be the blueprint for TikTok’s redemption, as the latter undoubtedly dominates short-form video. Plus, historically, if content creators wanted to make a long-form video, they’d post an excerpt on TikTok to divert viewers to a video platform that supports longer videos — which is almost always YouTube.

That’s a good amount of engagement time TikTok is missing out on due to the limitations of short-form video, especially considering there is indeed a large and passionate audience for long-form online content. A recent eMarketer survey among Gen Z users found that while consumption of short videos is the most common social media activity, over 50% of respondents also enjoy longer videos.

The above data also happened to come out around the same time YouTuber Jenny Nicholson’s four-hour video on the shuttered Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel went viral and introduced the grea t er public to the world of multihour YouTube video essays. While these videos tend to be on incredibly niche topics, as demonstrated by Nicholson those done well manage to hold millions of viewers rapt despite their movie-length runtimes.

For TikTok, the ability to platform both short- and long-form videos — and keep users in the app instead of jumping elsewhere — is obviously an appealing strategy as it looks to jumpstart growth. Of course, doing so puts it in even more direct competition with YouTube, whose creators are producing potentially Emmy-worthy videos that bring in viewership on par with Disney and Netflix.

Regardless of YouTube’s larger user base and decade-plus head start, TikTok currently leads in minutes watched per user. That’s a fact YouTube should consider as a very real threat to its unchallenged reign in the long-form social video world.

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How Americans Get News on TikTok, X, Facebook and Instagram

1. TikTok users’ experiences with news

Table of contents.

How people get news on TikTok
Views about news on TikTok
How people get news on X
Views about news on X
How people get news on Facebook
Views about news on Facebook
How people get news on Instagram
Views about news on Instagram
Acknowledgments
The American Trends Panel survey methodology

TikTok is an increasingly popular source of news for Americans – particularly young adults. A 2023 Pew Research Center study found that 14% of all U.S. adults say they regularly get news on the video-based platform . Among TikTok users, the share regularly getting news there is growing. And the vast majority of adult TikTok news consumers are under age 50, including 44% who are 18 to 29.

But TikTok’s future in the United States is uncertain. ByteDance, the platform’s China-based owner, is facing an order from the U.S. government to either divest from TikTok or be banned in the country.

Our survey looks at U.S. TikTok users’ experiences with getting news. Among the key findings:

Regardless of whether they turn to TikTok for news, most users see news-related content. TikTok users report seeing funny posts (84%) and people’s opinions (80%) related to current events at higher rates than news articles (57%) or breaking news information (55%).
TikTok news consumers are equally likely to get news from influencers or celebrities as they are from news outlets or journalists. About two-thirds of those who regularly get news on TikTok (68%) say they ever get news from influencers or celebrities, and 67% get news from news outlets or journalists. An even higher share (84%) say they get news from other people they don’t know personally (beyond influencers, journalists, advocacy groups, and friends, family and acquaintances).
TikTok news consumers are more likely than Americans who get news on Facebook and Instagram to view the news they get there as unique . Among those who regularly get news on TikTok, 35% say the news they get there is mostly news they would not have gotten elsewhere. By comparison, 14% of Facebook news consumers say the same about news they see on Facebook.

Bar chart about 4 in 10 TikTok users cite news as a reason they use the platform

Four-in-ten TikTok users say they regularly get news on the site. And when it comes to the reasons Americans use TikTok, relatively few cite news.

What sources people get news from on TikTok

TikTok news consumers are equally likely to get news from influencers or celebrities as they are from news outlets or journalists.

Bar chart showing influencers or celebrities and the news media are equally common news sources on TikTok

Among U.S. adults who say they regularly get news on TikTok, around two-thirds say they ever get news on the platform from influencers or celebrities (68%) or from news outlets or journalists (67%). Other sources of information, such as advocacy or nonprofit organizations (55%) and friends, family and acquaintances (48%), are less common.

Beyond these four types of sources, the vast majority of TikTok news consumers (84%) say they get news from other people they don’t know personally . In fact, accounts in this category are the most commonly cited source of news for TikTok news consumers, who are more likely than news consumers on other major social media sites to get news from other people they don’t know personally.

Inaccurate information

Bar chart 23% of TikTok news consumers say they often see news that seems inaccurate

About a quarter of U.S. adults who regularly get news on TikTok (23%) say they extremely or fairly often see news on the platform that seems inaccurate. Roughly half (49%) say they sometimes see information that seems inaccurate, while 28% say they rarely or never see inaccurate news.

Views by party

Among TikTok news consumers, similar shares of Republicans and independents who lean toward the Republican Party (22%) and Democrats and Democratic leaners (23%) say they often see news that seems inaccurate on the platform.

TikTok’s influence on the news users see

Bar chart showing most TikTok news consumers think TikTok influences the news they see

As lawmakers express concerns about the potential for the Chinese government to influence content on TikTok, most U.S. TikTok news consumers say they think the platform influences which news stories they see there at least to some extent. This includes roughly one-in-five (18%) who say TikTok influences the news content they see there a lot and an additional 44% who say TikTok does this some.

About a quarter of TikTok news consumers (27%) say the site does not influence which news stories they see there much, while 11% say TikTok exerts no influence at all.

Similar shares of Republicans (59%) and Democrats (63%) say they think TikTok influences which news stories they see on the platform at least somewhat.

TikTok as a source of unique news

Bar chart showing 35% of TikTok news consumers say news on TikTok is mostly news they wouldn’t have seen elsewhere

There is no consensus among U.S. adults who regularly get news on TikTok whether the news they get there is mostly unique or not. About a third (35%) say it’s mostly news they would not have gotten elsewhere, while 27% say it is mostly news they would have gotten elsewhere if they did not use TikTok. And 37% say the news they get on TikTok consists of both kinds of information about equally.

Butterfly chart showing Democrats more likely to say the news they get on TikTok is news they would have gotten elsewhere

Democrats (33%) are more likely than Republicans (18%) to say the news they get on TikTok is mostly news they would have gotten elsewhere if they didn’t use the platform.

Feeling worn out by news on TikTok

Bar chart showing about half of TikTok news consumers are rarely or never worn out by news content on the platform

Americans who regularly get news on TikTok are less likely to say they feel worn out by the news they see there compared with news consumers on the other sites studied.

About one-in-ten TikTok news consumers (11%) say they extremely or fairly often feel worn out by the news they see on the platform, while 36% say they sometimes do.

News consumers who see at least some political content (i.e., posts about politics or political issues) on TikTok are more likely than those who see less politics-related content to feel worn out by the news they see on the platform at least sometimes (56% vs. 33%).

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How Americans Navigate Politics on TikTok, X, Facebook and Instagram

Many americans find value in getting news on social media, but concerns about inaccuracy have risen, social media and news fact sheet, social media seen as mostly good for democracy across many nations, but u.s. is a major outlier, the role of alternative social media in the news and information environment, most popular, report materials.

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What’s in a Four Loko? A viral video about the adult beverage is causing confusion

A buzzy college-favorite drink is courting controversy once again.

On June 10, TikTok user @kylizzlec posted a short, 13-second clip that has since gone viral. In the video, which has more than 2.3 million views and more than 375,000 likes, the TikToker is shocked after discovering a nutritional fact about the Four Loko she’s been drinking.

“pov: we just realized there’s 300 calories in a four loko serving and almost 5 servings per can,” reads an on-screen caption.

The video shows two women with their mouths agape in shock. One holds a can of FourLoko with a straw peeking out of it. “Wait, this can’t be right,” she says.

The TikToker’s video riled people up, becoming a point of interest for many TikTok commenters, with more than 3,000 people sharing their thoughts.

“I get so scared with Alcohol calories😭,” wrote one user on the platform.

“Wait so it’s like 1,500 for one can????? 😭😭 bruh I’m never drinking a four loko again,” wrote another commenter, with someone else asking, “Why do they not have to put the calories on the can like any other food or drink ?”

Four Loko doesn’t list the nutrition facts on its website or packaging, but does list its Alcohol By Volume content. The lowest ABV the brand sells is 12.9% in flavors like its Strawberry Lemonade and Watermelon , and its highest ABV is 13.9% per 23.5 ounces in its Jungle Juice and Gold flavors.

According to its website, Four Loko is “a premium malt beverage” — which means it contains malted barley. The brand also lists “natural and artificial flavors” as ingredients on its site.

The FDA first began requiring nutritional labeling on food and drink in 1990 , after two decades of allowing companies to voluntarily apply them. Still, alcoholic beverages aren’t regulated by the FDA, but by a different federal agency called the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, which doesn’t require nutritional labeling .

The TTB says it considers calorie, carbohydrate, protein and other nutritional statements to be misleading unless the products list the amounts based on a single serving.

Since the calorie count isn’t made clear by Four Loko itself, curious drinkers like the TikToker have turned to other websites claiming to have the information.

“I look up ‘how many calories are in a green apple Four Loko,’” @kylizzlec said in a follow-up video viewed by TODAY.com that has since been deleted.

“The first thing that came up was it saying that there were 350 calories per serving,” she said. “Then we looked at the back of the can and the only thing under nutrition facts was that there was five ounces in a serving and that there were like almost five servings in the whole can.”

According to grocery store product listings , the label shown is actually for alcohol facts, not nutrition facts.

Some commenters disagreed with the OP’s assessment, with some tossing out other numbers.

Representatives for Four Loko parent company Phusion Projects did not immediately respond to TODAY.com’s request for comment.

What’s not in Four Loko? Caffeine

In 2010, Phusion Projects announced it was removing caffeine and two other ingredients from its products. This announcement came after the Food and Drug Administration warned the company it would take action against brands combining alcohol with stimulants like caffeine.

Now, the Four Loko website’s FAQ says it no longer contains ingredients such as caffeine, guarana or taurine, calling them potential health dangers.

“As part of a voluntary product reformulation in 2010, we removed those ingredients from the product, which is why we can confidently say Four Lokos aren’t dangerous when consumed responsibly,” the company wrote.

Phusion Projects notes that it wants customers to consume its products responsibly — “that means not chugging a Four Loko.”

Washington, D.C. native Joseph Lamour is a lover of food: its past, its present and the science behind it. With food, you can bring opposites together to form a truly marvelous combination, and he strives to take that sentiment to heart in all that he does.

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An Incomplete Guide

Love, Hate or Fear It,

tiktok has changed america.

As lawmakers argue for TikTok to be sold, some of the app’s most popular memes, from skateboarding with a Fleetwood Mac soundtrack to the renegade dance, have been seen tens of millions of times.

Introduction by Sapna Maheshwari

April 19, 2024

Hear Times writers tell the stories of how TikTok has influenced culture

By The New York Times

Has there ever been an app more American seeming than TikTok, with its messy democratic creativity, exhibitionism, utter lack of limits and vast variety of hustlers?

And yet, of course, TikTok is not American, which is the whole reason that in March, the House of Representatives passed a bill with broad bipartisan support that would force the Chinese owners of the video-app juggernaut to either sell to a non-Chinese owner or face a ban. Lawmakers say it’s a national security threat, and that the Chinese government could lean on its owner, ByteDance, to obtain sensitive U.S. user data or influence content on the app to serve its interests.

There’s a long road of legislation, deal making and legal challenges ahead before TikTok could be forced to change ownership or even be banned. The Senate would need to pass the legislation — which it may do as soon, now that the House has bundled it into a foreign aid package . It would have to survive lawsuits from TikTok and creators. Buyers would have to clear regulatory approval. And after all that, Beijing could simply block a deal.

But imagining what a United States without TikTok would look like throws into sharp relief just how much the app has worked its way into American culture.

Roughly 170 million Americans use TikTok. That’s half the population of the United States.

TikTok, which officially landed in the United States in 2018, was the most downloaded app in the country, and the world, in 2020, 2021 and 2022. It wasn’t that the elements of it were so new — compelling videos from randos had long been a staple of American pop culture — but TikTok put the pieces together in a new way.

Unlike Instagram, Facebook or Snapchat, TikTok didn’t build itself around social connections. Its goal is pure, uncut entertainment. The algorithm ingested every data point it could from what users skipped, liked or shared — and spat it directly into the maddeningly habit-forming For You Page. Fans whispered reverently that it knew them better than they knew themselves.

Here are 19 ways of understanding how TikTok became part of American life. The music America listens to, the movies it sees, what conspiracies it believes, how it can make or break a product’s success, who it defines as a celebrity — all of it has been influenced by TikTok, for good and bad. Even if you’ve never opened the app, you’ve lived in a culture that exists downstream of what happens there.

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It Became Hollywood’s Favorite Marketing Machine

By Brooks Barnes

#barbenheimer

#anyonebutyou

Insular, slow-changing Hollywood responded to TikTok’s arrival in 2018 in typical fashion: complete dismissal. We’re way too busy making pictures to worry about some new short-form video app.

Then came denial. (This thing is just another fad.) Next, fear. (Teenagers and young adults are never going to the movies again!)

But there’s a plot twist: Hollywood has come to see TikTok as indispensable.

“Anyone But You,” a Sony romantic comedy starring Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, arrived to a piddly $8 million in ticket sales over Christmas weekend. The movie turned into a full-fledged hit ($219 million) after TikTok users (at the urging of Sony) began making videos of themselves re-enacting the credit sequence.

TikTok also served as a ticket-selling machine for “M3gan,” a Universal-Blumhouse horror movie about a sassy robot that has spawned a new franchise; “Wonka,” which debuted in December and collected $632 million; and the Barbenheimer box office phenomenon, otherwise known as “Barbie,” with $1.4 billion, and “Oppenheimer,” with about $1 billion. Rote glamour shots and insipid interviews — ye olde studio publicity tools — don’t work on TikTok; users want behind-the-scenes “realness.” Hence “Oppenheimer” stars goofing in a hotel hallway before a premiere, and pink-clad “Barbie” stars cavorting on the floor with puppies .

“Now that studios have figured out how to harness TikTok, the last thing they want is for it to go dark,” said Sue Fleishman, a former Universal and Warner Bros. executive who is now a consultant. “That would actually be a big problem.”

It’s Gen Z’s Walter Cronkite

By Sapna Maheshwari

#medialiteracy

#moonlanding

Recently, V Spehar has posted TikTok videos telling viewers what they might have missed from President Biden’s State of the Union address, the first 15 actions that former President Donald J. Trump said he would take if he’s re-elected in November and Caitlin Clark’s WNBA starting salary.

Mx. Spehar posts to more than three million followers from the handle @UnderTheDeskNews and films many clips lying on the floor, a gimmick that began as an effort to differentiate from the authoritative tone of traditional television news anchors. The style of communication has resonated enough to make Mx. Spehar a regular at White House briefings with social media influencers.

News aggregation and analysis accounts like Mx. Spehar’s are shaping the discourse about current events in the United States, especially among young people. They’re a modern version of old-school bloggers — users respond to the personal tone, and the editorializing. ( Some creators have even built followings simply by reading print news articles to their followers.)

Pew Research Center has found that about one-third of 18- to 29-year-olds say they get news regularly on the platform, far outpacing people in other age groups.

In 2023, about 14% of American adults said they regularly got news on TikTok, compared with just 3% percent in 2020.

Other sites have similar draws. Roughly 16 percent of all American adults get their news from Instagram, and a similar amount from X. Far more people consume news on Facebook and YouTube.

The appeal of TikTok and other social sites has made mainstream outlets nervous, and has raised some concerns around accuracy and context as original reporting is funneled through other accounts. The Wall Street Journal has more than 340,000 followers on TikTok, while The New York Times has nearly 630,000 — numbers that pale in comparison with the followings of individual commentators like Mx. Spehar.

It Supercharges Conspiracy Theories

By Tiffany Hsu

#conspiracy

Several dentists recently took to TikTok to debunk a conspiracy theory: that toothpaste tubes were printed with secret codes signaling their true ingredients to powerful people in the know.

Their efforts garnered far fewer views than the video that offered up the theory in early January. Not counting all the times the post was referenced in videos by other TikTok users, it has been seen more than seven million times in less than three months.

Tall tales are common on TikTok, where a flimsy patchwork of assumptions and coincidences — often concerning the schemes of a nefarious echelon of elites — is illustrated by dramatic images generated by artificial intelligence and spooky musical tracks. (Other such hits include false theories that President Joe Biden rigged the Super Bowl in favor of the Kansas City Chiefs or that Justin Bieber had signaled he was a victim of PizzaGate. False allegations of voter fraud also abound.)

Abbie Richards, a misinformation researcher who studies the TikTok ecosystem, said that such posts thrive because of the platform’s potent recommendation algorithms and its low barrier to entry.

TikTok allows users to earn money from their videos through tools such as its creator rewards program and livestream subscriptions. Conspiracy theories, which draw high engagement, are one of the most profitable categories , said Ms. Richards, a senior video producer at the liberal watchdog group Media Matters.

“It’s like candy for your brain — it tells a story that simplifies the world in a way that feels good to you,” she said.

A quarter of American adults who use the app create 98% of its videos.

The toothpaste theory was promoted by two young men known for conspiratorial content, including popular posts about satanic hit men and Britney Spears . They claimed that the colored dots on toothpaste tubes correspond to all-natural, medicinal or chemical ingredients.

The post was quickly reposted, copied and stitched into reaction videos. Some came from dentists, who explained that the dots were actually used during the toothpaste packaging process to help guide manufacturing equipment to properly cut and seal the tubes.

That conspiracy theory is not new — they rarely are on TikTok. Colgate, a major toothpaste manufacturer, addressed the color patch rumor last year and said that “as much as we love cracking secret codes, this one actually has nothing to crack because it’s entirely untrue.”

Even silly rumors, however, can spin out from TikTok into real-world harms. The baseless concerns that store-bought toothpaste tubes might hide toxic ingredients reignited recommendations to opt instead for unproven and potentially damaging homemade options.

It Spawned a Zillion Trends. Or, at Least, “Trends”

By Madison Malone Kircher

Including but certainly not limited to: Butter boards , sexy water , blueberry milk nails , unexpected red , lucky girl syndrome , first-time-cool syndrome , bed rotting , 75 soft , 75 cozy , bookshelf wealth , loud budgeting , broccoli freckles , strawberry makeup , glazed donut skin , latte makeup , cowboy copper hair , old money blonde , expensive brunette , orange peel theory , quiet luxury , stealth wealth , tomato girl summer , indie sleaze , coquette , looksmaxxing , male perms , vanilla girl , clean girl , soft girl , coastal grandma , coastal cowgirl , low-high visual weight makeup , sleepy-girl mocktails , fluffy coffee , shrimp tree , girl math , girl dinner , mob wife , clowncore , balletcore , Barbiecore , royalcore , corecore .

It Got Taylor Swift to Defy Her Label

By Ben Sisario

#albumrelease

For the music industry , TikTok has become a potent but unpredictable promotional outlet, and a vital one in the race to mint a new hit. Young artists like Olivia Rodrigo and Lil Nas X saw their popularity explode on the platform, and acts like Fleetwood Mac have seen decades-old songs get a boost from memes on the app.

But TikTok is also the latest tech platform to draw the anger of the music industry for low royalty rates. In February, Universal Music Group, which represents artists like Ms. Rodrigo, Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Drake, withdrew the rights to its music on the app, saying that TikTok was trying to “bully” the company to accept low terms.

Within days, millions of TikTok videos using music from Universal artists went mute, and since then guessing which side would blink first has become a media-business parlor game.

Last week, however, Ms. Swift — who releases her music through Universal, but has owned the copyrights to her work since 2018 — broke ranks and put her songs back on TikTok , just ahead of the release of her next album on Friday. Now the question is, will other artists will follow.

It Might Just Be a Weapon

By David E. Sanger

For years I thought TikTok was mostly a parenting problem , and had only tangential bearing on what I cover: threats to national security. It took a while — and a lot of conversations with both tech firms and government officials — for me to become concerned about the potential that it could also pose a major problem on that front.

Not because the company’s Chinese owners could figure out your dance-move preferences, but because the algorithm at the core of the app is wrapped in such mystery.

So what’s the issue? The algorithm doesn’t belong to TikTok; it is provided by engineers working for ByteDance, the Chinese company that controls the platform and develops the code in enormous secrecy in laboratories around the world, in Beijing, Singapore and Mountain View, Calif.

No one outside the company knows exactly what goes into those algorithms.

The Chinese government is intent on keeping it that way. It has issued regulations that require Beijing’s regulators to grant permission before any ByteDance algorithms can be licensed to outsiders. They are unlikely to do so.

And so, as long as it is written by ByteDance, and can’t be picked apart on the outside, there will always be the risk that it will become a pipeline for influencing citizens, and thus voters, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

Senator Mark Warner, the chairman of Senate Intelligence Committee, has noted that because TikTok has emerged as a major source of news — and because it collects data on users that the Chinese government could find useful, even crucial — it poses a serious threat, and could become “the most powerful propaganda tool ever.”

Of course, that threat is mostly hypothetical at this point.

At least based on what the United States has made public. The intelligence agencies have been giving closed-door briefings, but presumably there hasn’t been a classified blockbuster, since there would likely be great pressure to declassify it.

Still, we have seen waves of new influence campaigns flowing out of China — much of it aimed at nations other than the United States. While TikTok has not been at the center of those campaigns, clearly, the Chinese have learned a lot in the past few years, including from the Russians. (Researchers have also found that topics commonly suppressed in China, including about the Tibetan and Uyghur populations, appear to be unusually underrepresented on TikTok compared with Instagram.)

This is not a problem that would be solved by simply selling TikTok’s operations to an American buyer. Sure, the bill that went through the House bans a new, Western-owned TikTok from having any “operational relationship” with ByteDance, “including any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm.” Good luck with that — TikTok would no longer be TikTok.

The real question is whether anyone gets to look under the hood. Because to make Americans trust TikTok, the country will need an early warning system, something that will assure everyone that a technology that became popular because it generated memes and celebrates self-expression does not become a conduit for a foreign government interested in subtly influencing how we vote.

It Turned the School Bathroom Into a Movie Set

By Natasha Singer

#toilettoks

#schoolbathroom

Southern Alamance Middle School, a public school in Graham, N.C., recently came up with a novel way to combat student distractions from social media. Or at least to curb the phenomenon that some teachers have dubbed “Toilet TikToks.”

The problem: Educators there noticed a spike in the number of students asking to leave class — sometimes as frequently as nine times per day — to go to the bathroom, where they made TikTok videos.

The solution: Administrators decided to remove the bathroom mirrors that students used to film TikToks and primp for their close-ups. They also introduced an online system that issues students digital hall passes when they want to be excused from class and that allows administrators to track students’ locations. “Since removing the mirrors,” administrators wrote in a message to parents in January, “we have seen a drastic decrease in bathroom visits from students asking to be excused just to make videos.”

Toilettoks — a TikTok genre, dating back at least five years, in which students use school bathrooms as film sets for dance routines , lip-syncing clips or critiques of unclean lavatories — are one of the milder social media annoyances for schools.

Across the United States, students have also used school bathrooms as arenas to stage, film and post videos of bullying, physical assaults on schoolmates and acts of vandalism .

In March, Alamance-Burlington schools announced that it was joining dozens of other U.S. districts that have filed lawsuits accusing social media platforms, including TikTok, of unfairly ensnaring young people.

“We’re seeing the negative impacts of social media on our students every day,” Kristy Davis, the acting superintendent of Alamance-Burlington schools, said. “Their well-being has to be the top priority.”

It Took Over All the Other Apps

By Amanda Hess

My favorite Instagram account is a collection of TikToks. Curated by the videographer Leia Jospé, @favetiktoks420 hunts for Gen-Z’s ickiest thirst traps and bleakest acting exercises and delivers them to me in a Millennial-safe package , uploading them directly to a social network that I actually use.

By the time TikTok debuted, in 2017, I was already in my 30s and too old and lazy to work another app into my rotation. Instagram and Twitter were distracting enough. But now those platforms lie downstream of TikTok’s creative wellspring, waiting for bits of its most popular content to drift into the open internet. TikToks float into my friends’ Instagram stories, percolate into our group chats, swirl into my Twitter feed. My phone is always bleating with its outro sound effect . I rarely open TikTok, but I watch TikToks all the time.

TikToks let loose a chaotic element into Instagram’s internet mall, and they break the monotony of Twitter’s boosted tech-bro threads. They stock YouTube compilations and spark Facebook debates and fuel trend pieces.

If TikTok were to disappear, it would feel, at least for a while, like the internet’s big content spigot had been turned to a trickle. Rival platforms have tried to remake themselves in TikTok’s image — building in short-form videos, algorithmic timelines and searchable sound clips — but have failed to reproduce the hypnotic energy of its perpetual discovery machine. We’d be left with a diluted version of its secret sauce.

But any network that hopes to capitalize on its own popularity will disrupt its product. Even as other social media platforms try to become TikTok, TikTok is trying to become them, lengthening its videos to compete with YouTube and introducing an e-commerce platform to “drive meaningful shopping experiences” and rival Instagram. Eventually some new, inexplicably addictive platform will rise in its place. And I will rely on the kindness of some slightly younger strangers to show me what’s on it.

It Mimics a Flow State

By Dana G. Smith

#satisfying

#oddlysatisfying

Much has been said about the “ addictive design ” of TikTok. But what is the social media site actually doing to our brains?

There is very little research looking at what goes on inside people’s heads while they’re using TikTok. But one small study conducted on Chinese university students used magnetic resonance imaging to compare brain activity while they watched personalized TikTok videos (ones the algorithm had selected based on their past use) versus generalized ones (videos the app recommended to new users).

The students had greater activity in several areas of the brain, including ones associated with reward, attention and processing social information, while viewing personalized videos. In other words, the algorithm did its job.

Other social media platforms have been shown to turn on similar brain regions . So what makes TikTok different? Some experts have proposed that it can send users into a “ flow state ”: the experience of being so absorbed in a task that the person loses track of time. Backing this up, one study found that TikTok users reported experiencing higher levels of flow than Instagram users.

“Flow” is often associated with work or hobbies — activities that are challenging enough to be engaging but not frustrating. Watching videos doesn’t require skill the way that many flow-inducing activities do, yet the app is able to induce the feelings of enjoyment, concentration and time distortion that are characteristic of flow — possibly because of the algorithm’s immersive quality.

It Won Over the Snobbiest Gatekeeper

By Vanessa Friedman

#tiktokfashion

Is there any more official signal that a business titan has arrived at the heart of the American social-financial-artistic-political power nexus than being invited to be an honorary host of the annual Met Gala, a.k.a. “the party of the year”? Any more glamorous recognition than being asked to join its convener, the Vogue editor, Anna Wintour, in the Metropolitan Museum’s soaring atrium as the great and the good of Hollywood, fashion, sports, Wall Street and Washington swan past?

On May 6, TikTok will be lead sponsor of both the party and the museum fashion exhibition it celebrates. The company’s chief executive, Shou Chew, has been named an honorary chair of this year’s gala, along with the Loewe designer Jonathan Anderson, while Ms. Wintour, Zendaya, Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez and Chris Hemsworth are the event’s co-chairs.

That placement would put TikTok firmly in the tradition of previous gala sponsors like Amazon, Instagram and Apple — tech companies bedazzled by the Old Establishment, which in turn is bedazzled by their blush of upstart cool.

It is an acknowledgment, if any were needed, of the prominent role the app has come to play in fashion in a mere few years.

It was only in 2021, after all, that Ms. Wintour was criticized for inviting TikTok stars such as Addison Rae and Dixie D’Amelio to the party — for somehow cheapening it by catering to the buzzfeed machine of the smartphone, rather than the elite. After all, not just anyone can get an invite, even if they can afford the $50,000 price tag for a seat; Ms. Wintour vets every guest, and the price of admission has to do with cultural currency even more than actual currency.

Which is why, of course, TikTok belongs. Despite the fact that all social media is forbidden inside the party.

Fast-forward three years, and there are more than 75 billion views associated with the #TikTokfashion hashtag; almost 500 million with #2023Gala alone. Luxury brands routinely sign up TikTok stars as brand ambassadors along with every other kind of star, hoping to access their audience (received relevance is something Vogue might be getting out of the association, too). And thus is created a virtuous — or vicious? — cycle in which TikTok feeds the gala machine, which feeds TikTok, which is the vicarious experience that has come to feed us all.

It Led People to Self-Diagnose ADHD

By Ellen Barry

#mentalhealth

#adhdcommunity

#psychiatry

TikTok is a mother lode of mental health content , filled with compelling first-person accounts of everything from major depression to selective mutism. Depending on your perspective, that’s either a very good thing — or concerning.

Corey Basch, who analyzed 100 popular TikTok videos with the hashtag #mentalhealth for a 2022 study, emerged concerned about the looping effect of the algorithm.

“What’s so important and disturbing to recognize is the downward spiral that users can get swept into,” said Dr. Basch, a professor of public health at William Paterson University. “If one is drawn to posts related to despair and anxiety, they can easily spend hours exposed to repetitive content known as an echo chamber.”

The surge of content about mental health has meant that young people are more likely to self-diagnose before seeing a clinician, psychiatrists report . Diagnoses for ADHD and anxiety disorders shot up during the pandemic years, especially among young people.

Some researchers have expressed concern about how profit motives may feed into these trends, since platforms often feature advertising from app-based mental health services, and influencers have sponsorship deals with such companies.

“They say we can diagnose you really quick, just take this five-question quiz and we can send you a prescription in a nice little box,” said Holly Avella, a Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University who has researched mental health and social media.

Researchers also warn that TikTok videos can deliver misinformation . A review of literature published last year found that around one-fifth of videos mentioning cognitive behavioral therapy were inaccurate, describing it as ineffective or harmful.

But some users credit the app with breaking open the national conversation around mental illness.

“You can sit there on your pedestal and pooh-pooh it all you want,” said Kate Speer, who has used her social media feeds to describe her experience of serious mental illness. TikTok is helpful for “the very people who are struggling the most, those who don’t have access to services in the real world and who might even be so disabled by mental illness that they are locked in their houses.”

It’s the Latest Campaign Tool

By Michael M. Grynbaum

President Biden turned down an opportunity to appear on CBS and reach tens of millions of potential voters tuning in for this year’s Super Bowl. Instead, he released his first TikTok .

“Chiefs or Niners?” asked a disembodied, youthful-sounding voice. “Two great quarterbacks; hard to decide,” replied the president, casually dressed in a half-zip sweater and khakis. The caption was “lol hey guys.”

Team Biden, like most other major politicians , had previously resisted joining the app because of security concerns related to its Chinese ownership. (The Donald Trump campaign is not on TikTok, and Mr. Trump has expressed divergent views about the app, proposing a ban during his presidency but recently criticizing an attempt by Congress to curtail its use in the United States.)

Giving in was a nod to the irrefutable importance of TikTok, where about 14 percent of American adults regularly get news, in an election year. There’s now a small studio in the Biden campaign office in Wilmington, Del., where staff members can film “candid” videos with the candidate.

62% of Americans between 18- and 29-years-old use the platform, greater than the share of that age group that voted in the last presidential election.

Campaigns have a rich tradition of adapting to the latest technological fads, from wireless radio to television sets and, more recently, to social platforms like Facebook and Snapchat. Many of these efforts share a how-do-you-do-fellow-kids quality to them, and in an attempt to avoid appearing out of touch, the Biden campaign relies on young, digitally fluent aides to host its TikToks.

It works, sometimes. One video claims to have Trump “caught on camera” making offensive remarks, an attempt to replicate the amateur spontaneity of many TikToks. (In reality, it’s someone’s iPhone aimed at a TV broadcast of a Trump speech.) Other times it comes across try-hard-y, like the video that dismisses a post by Representative Jim Jordan using a popular “ I Ain’t Reading All That ” online meme.

The @bidenhq account, though, is hovering around 299,000 followers — still small beans in the TikTok world. But in a close race, every lol counts.

It’s the New Mall

By Jordyn Holman

#denimskirt

#springfashion

#goingouttops

Most months, when Kiara Springs posts on her TikTok account about mini skirts or linen tops she finds on Amazon, she earns $10,000 to $12,000 for getting people to buy what she suggests. During her biggest month, Ms. Springs, 25, raked in $50,000 for her posts.

TikTok is now a multibillion-dollar shopping experience — and companies have glommed on. The internet might have killed malls, but now it is one big mall.

Because the bite-size videos are addictive, and partly because advertising on the platform is relatively inexpensive for smaller brands, the app has become a core part of many companies’ marketing plans. Brands say that their videos populated with everyday people can more easily go viral than on, say, Instagram, where they often need to pay expensive influencers. And people who notice shopping-related content spend more time on TikTok, according to eMarketer.

The average user spends nearly an hour — 58 minutes — per day on the platform.

Last year, TikTok debuted a prominent shopping feed on the app that now allows people to buy goods directly from a wide array of vendors. Some fashion and beauty brands think about the TikTok content they could make for a product before developing it.

Fiona Co Chan, a co-founder of Youthforia, a beauty and skin care brand with roughly 190,000 followers on the app, says if she can’t think of 200 TikTok videos that she could make for a product, she’ll likely scrap it entirely.

It Made You Buy That One Water Bottle

By Santul Nerkar

When a product goes viral on TikTok, those views often translate directly into increased sales. In some cases, the effect has been dramatic:

Stanley tumblers Company revenue last year was $750 million, up from $73 million in 2019, after the product became a sensation on TikTok.

Feta cheese Demand jumped 200 percent at one grocery chain in 2021, after a recipe for baked feta pasta took off and amassed more than 20 million views.

Cerave Sales increased by more than 60 percent in 2020 after skin care became a lockdown pastime and TikTok users discovered the drugstore mainstay.

Cat Crack Catnip It briefly sold out in 2021 after TikTok users posted videos of their cats going crazy for it.

Isle of Paradise tanning spray It sold out in 48 hours in 2021 after a post about it went viral.

Prepdeck kitchen storage products They went out of stock in 2021 after going viral.

It Turned Recipes Into Concepts

By Becky Hughes

#pancakecereal

#italiansub

Cooking is different now. One crucial distinction between the hit recipes of today (like Emily Mariko’s salmon and rice bowl ) and those of yesteryear ( The Silver Palate’s chicken marbella ) is the medium.

Before, a static image was all you had to get the point across in a recipe, with step-by-step instructions printed in a cookbook.

Now recipes unfold over time. In a 30-second video, there are obvious visual cues that viewers can absorb, techniques they can sink their teeth into. The videos depict process, not just stages, and allow you to jump-cut your way through a recipe in a few blinks.

But for all the access to techniques and cuisines that TikTok has provided home cooks, the platform favors concepts, over actual recipes — eggs fried in a puddle of pesto , sandwich fillings chopped into a homogenous mixture , mini pancakes served like cereal . The most shareable recipes are the ones that you can watch once, then turn around and make — no measurements, bake times or reading needed. Just dump, stir, like, follow, repeat.

It Knows Where You Live

By Kashmir Hill

Every social media app is, essentially, a spy in your pocket. When it comes to data collection, TikTok is no worse than the others. The main difference, and the one that’s driving the current conversation in Washington, is that TikTok is owned by a Chinese company.

TikTok, like other apps, seeks a huge amount of information from you, and some pieces of it that can seem innocuous are quite revealing, including:

Your I.P. address and location

An I.P. address is a unique identifier associated with your device or the network you use to get on the internet. TikTok can use your I.P. address and location to determine the advertising you see, but it can also reveal other real-life associations. When people access a social network from the same I.P. address, it reveals that they may know one another offline. ByteDance, which owns TikTok, used I.P. address data collected from journalists using the app to try to identify company employees who were speaking to them.

Your contacts

Giving TikTok access to the hundreds (or thousands) of numbers and email addresses on your phone — an opt-in feature — lets them draw unexpected insights into your life, such as who your doctors are, your present and former colleagues, your one-night stands, and on and on. TikTok may then recommend you follow them as “people you may know” — and your account, in turn, will be suggested to them, so beware of sharing contacts if you’re trying to stay anonymous. Even if you don’t share your contacts, TikTok can look for the phone or email address you gave the company in other users’ address books unless you go into the privacy settings and turn off “Suggest Your Account to Others.”

Your messages

Unless your messages are end-to-end encrypted, which they are not on TikTok, they can be reviewed by the company storing them for you.

Your viewing history

Are you obsessed with steamy Twilight highlight reels or home repair videos? TikTok knows.

It Teaches 22-Year-Olds How to Live Their Best Middle-Age Life

By Anemona Hartocollis

#midlifemuse

Shelley Polanco is 22, and a senior at Brandeis. As she faces life after college, she is not looking for practical advice about, say, jobs and careers. She yearns instead for a guidebook to what it feels like to be an adult, something to tell her about her future emotional life and satisfaction.

And so, she likes following TikTok accounts that feature “an older woman of culture, kind of like this auntie figure who gets on TikTok and records ‘things I wish I would have known in my 20s.’”

She’s a fan of @itsrealllylola . “She’s turning 25, and she starts to speak about all the things she’s learned, the ways you maybe want to ignore people’s judgments on you,” Ms. Polanco says. “She’s big on ‘live your life and have fun.’”

She peers decades into her future with the help of Dr. Amanda Hanson , “#midlifemuse,” who invites comments about life after 50 from her TikTok followers. Or Shera Seven . “She is this 40-year-old woman, I want to say, giving really brutal dating advice,” Ms. Polanco said.

Ms. Polanco was having trouble seeing more than three months out, and found support from a TikTok transformation coach named Shannon . “I searched, ‘how to write goals,’” she said. “There was this lady walking you through this meditation to visualize your future self, and it was one of the only times I could see an older version of myself. It was so inspirational, I closed the app, got out a piece of paper and started writing.”

It Helped You Ask for a Raise

By Mike Dang

#paytransparency

#yourrichbff

In a video by the account @salarytransparentstreet that’s been viewed more than 23 million times, a lawyer candidly shares she makes $134,000 a year, a teacher says she earns $53,000 and a man who does chemical risk assessments for the federal government divulges he makes $60,000 a year. The point, according to Hannah Williams, the 27-year-old content creator behind the account, is to help people better understand what they could be earning. (Ms. Williams says she made more than $1 million in 2023 before expenses through her videos and earns revenue from brand sponsorships and ads ).

FinTok, as the money and personal finance community on the app is called, has fundamentally changed the way we accept advice from strangers — and altered how much ordinary people are willing to share about that most taboo subject: how much money they have.

Sure, the app has allowed established finance gurus like Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman to expand their empires. But is has also given rise to people like Vivian Tu, a 30-year-old former Wall Street trader who runs the account @yourrichbff . Ms. Tu, who has 2.5 million followers, offers practical advice on high-yield savings accounts and retirement savings , but can also take widely discussed TikTok drama and show people what financial lessons they can learn from it.

57% of Gen Z users like or leave a comment after watching a video on the platform.

As with anything on TikTok, scrolling through FinTok videos requires a certain amount of skepticism. There are plenty of cryptocurrency creators on TikTok who like to focus on the potential gains rather than warning people of the risks. There are also crypto scams, including a rampant one using deepfake videos of Elon Musk. (Ads for crypto or financial services are banned from the platform, in part to help protect people from getting involved with high-risk investments. )

But often, when scams or bad advice crop up, commenters have no problem offering corrections. When one creator posted a video about how to get a high credit limit using dubious methods, her comment section quickly filled up with users accusing her of committing fraud. The video was soon deleted.

It Tilted Your Screen

By Ashwin Seshagiri

TikTok didn’t invent vertically oriented videos. But it has been very influential in getting people to watch their screens upright instead of sideways. It’s a phenomenon that is sticking elsewhere, with Apple, a professional Spanish soccer league and major news publishers all producing vertical videos. Even The New York Times is on board.

Design and development by Michael Beswetherick

Editing by Noreen Malone, Ashwin Seshagiri, Matt Ruby and Sharon O’Neal

Additional production by Brent Murray, Amanda Cordero and Joshua Shao

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kate lindsay. ·. November 16, 2022. Read full story. Kaylani writes The Deep Dive, a newsletter in which she curates five video essay recommendations every week, although I discovered her on TikTok, where her videos highlighting recent stand-out essays have received millions of views of their own.
TikTok: Impact on Human Creativity
TikTok: Impact on Human Creativity Essay. TikTok is a short-form video platform with user-generated content where billions of people post their creative ideas. It boosts communication, provides knowledge and entertainment, and affects the human lifestyle. However, this app elicits criticism from people who believe that, despite its benefits to ...
Brockton student's college essay for Harvard goes viral on TikTok
Mack read the introduction to her Common App essay in a May 3 TikTok video. The initial video has been viewed 17 million times as of Thursday. It has been "liked" 4.7 million times.
TikTok's Impact on Social Media: [Essay Example], 850 words
Since its launch in 2016, TikTok has rapidly gained widespread popularity, particularly among younger demographics. With its unique format and engaging content, TikTok has significantly influenced the social media landscape, sparking discussions about its positive and negative impacts, as well as a range of controversies.This essay aims to analyze the impact of TikTok on social media ...
How TikTok Is Rewriting the World
By John Herrman. March 10, 2019. Hello, person who is, statistically speaking, a human adult aged approximately "millennial" to "boomer.". The analytics suggest a high likelihood that you ...
The Impact of Tiktok on Society and Culture
The short-form video format of TikTok has also changed how we consume entertainment. Users can easily scroll through an endless feed of bite-sized videos, creating a unique and highly engaging viewing experience. This format has not only captivated younger audiences but also challenged the dominance of long-form content.
The best video essays of 2023
The best video essays on YouTube came from Hbomberguy, Defunctland, F.D. Signifier and more, explaining race, politics, Barbie, media, and YouTube itself. ... TikTok More Guides Dragon's Dogma 2 ...
We're in a Golden Era of Video Essays and That Is Awesome
Video essays are thriving in the TikTok era, even while platforms like YouTube are pivoting to promote short-form content. According to Vox, their popularity reflects our desire for more nuanced content online. Video essays have been around for a decade or more on YouTube. Since 2012, when the platform began to prioritize watch-time over views ...
Urban Tandoor Lures Customers With Campy TikTok Videos
Urban Tandoor, an Indian restaurant in southwest England, is using terrible music video parodies made by its staff to bring in new and younger guests.
Don't Forget to Like, Subscribe and Vote: Biden's Rocky Influencer
(The video with Mr. Biden, filmed at the Detroit Auto Show, went viral, notching 40 million views on TikTok — but it fell far short of the 60 million views Mr. Mac got for an interaction with ...
#essays
essays | 172M views. Watch the latest videos about #essays on TikTok.
Tyler Bergantino And Gabby Gonzalez Talk TikTok Love Story
Gonzalez, in the video, offers to drive Bergantino to the airport. If he returned to Miami, she'd be the "main reason," he says. "It was definitely an interesting goodbye," Gonzalez ...
Exclusive: TikTok preparing a US copy of the app's core algorithm
TikTok is working on a clone of its recommendation algorithm for its 170 million U.S. users that may result in a version that operates independently of its Chinese parent and be more palatable to ...
I Saw a TikTok-Famous Medium to Connect With My Late Mother
I've always been what some may call "woo-woo." I'm a self-identified crystal girlie, another 20-something on her spiritual journey, and yes, if given the opportunity, I will take every tarot card ...
Why Long-Form TikTok Videos Make Perfect Sense
After YouTube found success in taking from TikTok's short-form playbook, TikTok is returning the favor with increasing the app's video limit to a full 60 minutes as the battle for users ...
How TikTok users experience news there and what they think
A 2023 Pew Research Center study found that 14% of all U.S. adults say they regularly get news on the video-based platform. Among TikTok users, the share regularly getting news there is growing. And the vast majority of adult TikTok news consumers are under age 50, including 44% who are 18 to 29. But TikTok's future in the United States is ...
What's In A Four Loko? Viral TikTok Questions Calories and ...
A buzzy college-favorite drink is courting controversy once again. On June 10, TikTok user @kylizzlec posted a short, 13-second clip that has since gone viral. In the video, which has more than 2. ...
Long video essays are the best #fyp #foryoupage #summoningsalt ...
916.9K Likes, 3.5K Comments. TikTok video from Christopher Scanlon (@christopherscanlon): "Long video essays are the best #fyp #foryoupage #summoningsalt #youtube #videoessy #video #defunctland". video essays. were finally landing - lily.
How TikTok Changed America
Insular, slow-changing Hollywood responded to TikTok's arrival in 2018 in typical fashion: complete dismissal. We're way too busy making pictures to worry about some new short-form video app ...
Donald Trump joins TikTok after seeking to ban video app as ...
Former President Donald Trump has joined TikTok, the fast-growing social media platform with ties to China that Trump had railed against as president. CNN values your feedback 1.