TikTok Is the Perfect Social Media — Here's Why You Should Delete It

When an app has perfected the art of keeping you engaged — run.

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

TikTok is the best example of social media’s danger when it works perfectly in an imperfect world.

Today I’m going to shift from my usual AI articles to a topic I’ve been wanting to write about for a long time; social media. This one is a bit longish but I promise you it’s worth a read.

Today I won’t be talking about models or systems that haven’t yet reached the public domain. I won’t focus on the technical side of AI. Instead, I’ll dive into its social side. The side we all interact with in our daily lives. The side that’s constantly deteriorating our well-being.

Let me introduce you to the main character of today’s issue: TikTok. Currently, the undisputed king of social media. It may not be the largest or the most profitable (ahem, Facebook) — yet. But it’s growing the fastest in history and it’s achieving its goals like no other before.

Some quick numbers: Daily use of TikTok in 2021 reached 44 min, surpassing Facebook (all-time high of 39.8 min), Instagram, and Youtube by a considerable margin. TikTok is expected to reach 1.8 billion monthly users by the end of 2022. That’s 1 in 4 people using TikTok — up from 1 in 80 just four years ago.

NYT columnist Ezra Klein gives a clear overview of TikTok’s dominance with an eye-opening sentence: “In 2021, [TikTok] had more active users than Twitter, more U.S. watch minutes than YouTube, more app downloads than Facebook, more site visits than Google.” 

More. Site. Visits. Than. Google.

Competing social media companies are releasing features that copy TikTok’s design in a desperate attempt to replicate this unprecedented global phenomenon. Reels and shorts are resulting but only in part, as Instagram and YouTube don’t seem to be able to stop TikTok’s ascension.

ByteDance — TikTok’s parent company — executives must be rubbing their hands. TikTok has hit the jackpot all social media companies chase.

And that’s bad news for us.

TikTok is making the news every week

Before jumping into what makes TikTok uniquely problematic, let me illustrate just how dominant it has become with a brief review of very recent — bad — news about the company. What I’m going to share next has been reported within the last 30 days.

In the social spotlight: TikTok has proven deadly

A week ago, Journalist Mitchell Clark wrote for The Verge that “the TikTok ‘blackout challenge’ has now allegedly killed seven kids.” All were under 15 years old. A 14-yo, two 12-yo, two 10-yo, a 9-yo, and an 8-yo kid died last year trying to replicate a viral ‘challenge’ that consists in choking themselves. 

TikTok claims they blocked search options for that type of content, but Smith and Arroyo, who filed the latest lawsuit against the company, argue that the content was promoted to their children through the For You feed. The company keeps actively pushing harmful trends and isn’t doing enough to prevent these tragedies.

In the political spotlight: A new threat to the US

China poses a threat to the US in many ways. One of the most recent — and hardest to handle — is TikTok. As BuzzFeed News reporter Emily Baker-White wrote, TikTok could become a problem for national security after leaked audio revealed that “China-based employees of ByteDance have repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about US TikTok users.”

And there’s another threat. What Ezra Klein calls ‘the manipulation problem:’ “TikTok’s real power isn’t over our data. It’s over what users watch and create. It’s over the opaque algorithm that governs what gets seen and what doesn’t.” US regulators fear that TikTok could be used to create targeted disinformation campaigns guided indirectly by the Chinese government.

In the business spotlight: The preferred of the youngest

TikTok isn’t only threatening social media companies. Apart from YouTube, TikTok seems to also be driving users away from Search and Maps — core Google services, as reported by TechCrunch. A Google exec shared internal analytics that reveals almost 40% of generation Z users prefer TikTok (and Instagram) to Google or YouTube.

In one way or another TikTok is — intendedly or not — monopolizing our attention. Make no mistake, TikTok’s goals are the same as Facebook’s, Instagram’s, or YouTube’s. The difference lies in that TikTok is succeeding — in an unprecedented way — there where others are failing. But, how?

As writer Isaiah McCall says, TikTok is the “perfect social media app.” 

Again, good for them— and bad for the rest of us.

Let’s understand why.

How TikTok knows you so well

TikTok’s algorithm, not unlike the others, is focused on watch time. Users are often unaware that the content they consume is decided by an algorithm depending on what they’ve seen previously. But even if they knew and wanted to change it — or, at the very least, have more info on how it works — they couldn’t. Opacity keeps TikTok in power.

But this doesn’t make it different from, say, Instagram or YouTube. Recommendation algorithms are always opaque and tend to be the most jealously-guarded secrets of social media companies. 

What makes TikTok’s algorithm especially posited to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities is the absence of decision fatigue. 

As Scott Galloway wrote on Medium: 

“The biggest mistake we make in marketing is believing choice is a benefit. No, it’s a tax. Consumers don’t want more choices, they want more confidence in the choices presented. TikTok has taken this to a new level by eliminating the burden of choice entirely. Its content is a continuous stream of videos where the decisions are made for you. Your only choice: what not to watch.”

The fact that the algorithm is making all the choices for you gets even worse if we take into account the discoveries made by The Wall Street Journal. 

They investigated TikTok’s For You feed and found out the secret to how it knows you so well.

WSJ created +100 TikTok bots with predesigned interest tags to analyze the algorithm’s behavior. They found that TikTok “only needs one important piece of information to figure out what you want: the amount of time you linger over a piece of content. Every second you hesitate or rewatch, the app is tracking you.”

In as soon as 40 minutes of watch time, TikTok’s algorithm learned the bots’ interests even if they never expressed them explicitly — only signaled through the bots’ response to the content. By rewatching and pausing, TikTok knew what videos kept them engaged — even if they didn’t really like them.

That could be the case of the bot named kentucky_96, whose interests were “sadness” and “depression”. It stopped and rewatched more and more videos related to those topics and TikTok began to show increasingly more similar content. That could perfectly reflect the behavior of a 13-yo kid that’s living through a hard time.

At about 36 minutes of watch time, TikTok had figured the bot out. At that point, it was showing kentucky_96 a staggering 93% of videos related to depression.

A TikTok spokesperson said that human behavior is too broad to be captured by a bot but that’s not what WSJ found — even bots with diverse interests were “rabbit-holed.”

Guillaume Chaslot, an ex-Google employee who worked on the YouTube algorithm, helped review the results. For him, the danger of TikTok is the quantitative jump it represents with respect to previous social media algorithms. “On YouTube, more than 70% of the views come from the recommendation engine … In TikTok is even worse. It’s probably 90–95%,” he told the WSJ. 

“The algorithm is able to find the piece of content that you’re vulnerable to. That will make you click. That will make you watch. But it doesn’t mean you really like it … it’s just the content that’s the most likely to make you stay on the platform.”

That’s the key to understanding how all social media algorithms work. They are optimized to keep you there — regardless of whether you’re actually liking the content or not.

To raise awareness of the impact of algorithms, Chaslot founded AlgoTransparency. They managed to make YouTube change its algorithm. “We believe that users should be in control of what they want to see, instead of being unknowingly influenced by a system with misaligned incentives.”

I wholeheartedly agree.

TikTok is reportedly doing its best to prevent users to engage in extreme content — whether that’s political conspiracies, sexually explicit content, or self-harm videos that may eventually cause sad tragedies like the ones caused by the blackout challenge.

But that’s not enough. They’ve designed a highly addictive algorithm that works way too well. Not even they can easily stop it from finding its way into making users engage. At all costs. And it’s costing us a lot.

The ultimate social media app

However, not everyone thinks the algorithm is, by itself, what makes TikTok so special. Instead, it’s the combination with other features: Tons of data points from engaged users and, as Scott Galloway highlighted, a perfect setting to lose themselves in a sea of psychological ease.

That’s what professor Julian McAuley concluded after reading the leaked document “TikTok Algo 101,” to which the NYT had access (it isn’t downloadable anywhere). 

He told the NYT that TikTok stands out because of “fantastic volumes of data, highly engaged users, and a setting where users are amenable to consuming algorithmically recommended content (think how few other settings have all of these characteristics!). Not some algorithmic magic.”

The algorithm may not be the only key ingredient of TikTok’s success but is certainly an important part. Chaslot agrees. “I think it’s a crazy idea to let TikTok’s algorithm steer the life of our kids … Each video a kid watches, TikTok gains a piece of information on him. In a few hours, the algorithm can detect his musical tastes, his physical attraction, if he’s depressed…”

TikTok is winning the game of social media. Be it the algorithm, the number of data points they take per minute, or its ability to exploit psychological vulnerabilities.

What’s clear is they’ve found the secret sauce. 

To destroy an entire generation. 

In a few decades, we’ll look back and see TikTok as the quintessential example of the social media era. It’s in our hands to decide whether we’ll want to be happy or sad when we think about the decisions that we made.