“I’ve heard that, recently, I’ve been on the [TikTok] ‘For You’ page, so I thought I would get on here myself.” Within nine hours, the eight-second video accumulated 7 million views, 1.7 million likes, and 67,300 comments.
Mere days after becoming the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris made her own personal account on the controversial social media app. Harris’ actions underline how TikTok has become a crucial platform for those with a message. Yet news of the U.
S. government’s effort to ban the social media app has been hard to ignore. Legislators fear TikTok provides the Chinese government access to user data, and on April 24, President Joe Biden signed a bill that would ban the app in the U.
S. should TikTok’s China-based owner, ByteDance, fail to sell its stake by Jan. 19, 2025.
TikTok started as three separate apps, which eventually merged in 2018. In its early days, the app gave users a way to make short lip-sync videos, but it soon became a platform where music artists could launch songs and become viral success stories. The app reached new heights of popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic and has since become a go-to platform for marketers to reach younger audiences.
It has also become a lifeline for many creators who have parlayed their personalities and interests into careers. “I know people have a negative connotation to influencers, and I totally understand that, but there’s some of us [who] kind of fell into this by m.