What does the future hold for TikTok?
Oh, TikTok. The global sensation that put rival social media stalwarts on notice.
Since its launch in 2016 (and subsequent popularity explosion during COVID), the short video social media platform has helped drive a massive shake-up in the type of content millions of us engage with every day. And it turns out we engage a lot: Kiwis who are active on social media spend on average almost 22 hours a month scrolling TikTok!
But what’s happening with the social media company, and what do you need to know about where things are heading? Well, we’ve done the digging for you and have shared our take on where things are going.
EU orders TikTok to change its ‘addictive’ design
If you’ve ever spent time on TikTok, you might be familiar with scrolling through a few videos to pass the time then looking up and suddenly realising 30 minutes has disappeared. Well, according to the European Commission, that’s not an accident.
In fact, this year the EU has ordered the company to change its “addictive design”, finding that TikTok’s features such as the For You Page, can harm its audiences with no mitigations in place to protect users. Essentially, you scroll and scroll and scroll with no incentive to look away. Meta has also faced landmark legal issues around user safety and addiction.
Naturally, TikTok rejects the claims but the whole topic points to a more far reaching issue. Is this the beginning of a reckoning for social media giants and the relative freedom they’ve enjoyed to treat users as they wish?
Our take? The globalisation of platforms like TikTok makes regulation extremely tough to enforce. As we’ve already seen, any lone country taking matters into their own hands is met with fierce resistance (anyone remember the infamous Facebook news ban in Australia circa 2021?)
We’d very much like to see greater accountability in this space as the EU is proposing, but something tells us we aren’t going to see massive change overnight.
Meta’s juicy carrot for top content creators
In March this year, Meta announced it is launching a new programme to encourage top performing content creators from TikTok, Instagram and YouTube to post on Facebook.
Desperately keen not to be left behind by the alluring short and long-form videos championed on rival social media platforms, Facebook is putting its money where its mouth is to bring the content to its own audience.
Established creators with at least 100,000 followers will receive US$1,000 a month, while mega social media stars with at least one million followers will get US$3,000. But the catch? The payments will only last three months, with creators told they can expect access to Facebook’s Content Monitisation programme from there on in.
For TikTok, the cross-posting on Facebook is unlikely to put a dent in its popularity. The whole platform is designed for punchy, engaging videos served up on a custom-designed content wheel for each and every user. In a world still hungry for video, content creators will follow the money and right now TikTok remains a very lucrative option. We don’t see Facebook taking away any considerable market share, but it still remains a well-loved (and used) platform.
New deal seals TikTok’s future in the U.S
Following widespread fears about national security and Chinese ownership of data, the U.S has brokered a deal that sees a majority-American board now owning a separate entity of TikTok in the U.S.
The move might be seen as a sensible solution for stopping foreign government interference and the potential spread of propaganda to U.S audiences, but some are already voicing concerns about Donald Trump and his ties to the group of investors bankrolling the new entity. Additionally, these types of deals don’t address the issue of algorithms that drive people into echo chambers, or worse, feed them mis/disinformation.
What does it all mean? Discernment around what social media is showing us and why remains as important as ever. When it comes to vested interests - no matter the platform, we should all be asking ourselves, “why am I being shown this and is it truthful?”.
We firmly believe - as we always have, that organisations posting on TikTok (and other channels) must be committed to sharing authentic, honest content. As misinformation and disinformation continue to proliferate online, people are slowly becoming more sceptical of what they are seeing, and bad actors caught doing the wrong thing risk tarnishing their reputation and social licence to operate.