What Can TikTok Offer to Societies? Beyond What Meets the Eye
We all know it. By now, it has become one of the leading mainstream platforms, bringing to the social media scene a new feature and a new form of entertainment, reels. It is TikTok, the short-form video entertainment platform that in no time usurped one of the internet’s leading social media kings, Instagram.
Used by people from all generations and anywhere in the world, TikTok is usually portrayed as this monstrous time-consuming beast, leaving users in a perpetual state of doomscrolling, going from one post to another. Its state-of-the-art algorithm mainly drives this consumption behavior, but what if I tell you that this youthful platform has more to offer than meets the eye?
This time, in this piece, we won’t focus on TikTok’s dark side – and believe me, there is one – but rather shine some bright light on what this short-form video platform has to offer, not only to entertain but to educate on matters that need to be highlighted.
As a rising social networking giant, TikTok changed social media platforms’ dynamics and their parents’ oh-so charismatic behavior. As a platform initially directed toward a younger audience, TikTok became one of the leading platforms on the internet, mainly due to its design model.
Scrollable and user-friendly, the ByteDance-owned platform delivers what is needed to attract any generation to its diversified content, seamlessly enabling it to go viral and, most importantly, adored by literally everyone – except the US congress.
From the Public, to the Public.
Primarly, what distinguishes TikTok from other similar US-owned social platforms is how it allows creators to develop their own content, no strings attached, post it, and connect users with each other through one of the most attractively entertaining ways: videos.
No matter what the content is, there is always something for someone. Someone out there is looking increase their knowledge on whatever content someone thought of creating. With more than 1 billion active users, and the number is magnifying daily, TikTok has become an essential part for individuals and businesses alike to promote products, spread knowledge, connect with a new customer base, and more.
All this is doable with just one scroll.
The platform is not just about posting challenges and dancing videos anymore, it goes beyond that. The beneficial side of TikTok is its attraction of wide range of audiences, making it a treasure trove for people looking to monetize from their content and businesses targetting a wider audience.
Raising Awareness of Issues that Really Matter
TikTok has a remarkable ability to highlight specific issues in the world and raise awareness to make the public more woke of matters that we thought to be pushed under the rug, so to speak. Some of these discussions fall under the big umbrella of raising awareness on social injustice, climate, mental health, and other worldly matters.
Quite recently, social activism reached new highs on the platforms, driven by its free-to-all design model, allowing users to openly express their thoughts on a particular matter and vocalize their concerns on things that really matter.
Such behavior generated remarkable change in the world. I will give a simple example, the Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM). During the misfortunate events that led to the movement, a movement that would be historical in American history, the hashtag fueled social advocacy on the internet, which was later taken to the street.
From one hashtag, racial injustice was highlighted and shown in all of its inglorious forms, igniting a wave of protests that swept the US and other nations off their feet. Discrimination was more openly scrutinized as TikTok took the voice of the prejudicially treated and spread it across the globe in no time. Raising awareness of one of the world’s most unforgiven injustices, racism.
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