Tik Tok videos can be filmed anywhere, and with numerous students in the school having downloaded this popular app, students and teachers see other students both filming and watching these tik tok videos at lunch, or even in class.
“At lunch I see a lot of the girls watching the content on tik tok as well as creating similar videos to the ones that they watch. The videos I have seen are pretty funny, and it is entertaining to watch my friends create the videos, and then to watch the finished clip,” junior Kyler Hamlin said.
The IOS and Android social media app musical.ly launched in April of 2004 was taken over by ByteDance in 2017 and renamed TikTok, an app for creating and sharing short lip sync, comedy, talent, and dancing videos videos. The two apps, musical.ly and Tik Tok, are alike but different. While being the same app with a new name, tik tok contains more comedy content viewed for entertainment, while musical.ly was based mainly off of sped up lip syncing videos, with users gaining popularity based off of looks and quality of the video. Within the past year, over two million Tik Tok accounts were created, and the app gained major popularity. Users on the app are of all ages, kids, tweens, teens and even adults.
With this app being a comical source of entertainment, the main goal of uploading these videos publicly is to go viral or become “TikTok famous.” When creating your account, you have the option to make your account private or public, along with other social media apps.
Once posting these videos on a public account, anyone with or without the app is able to view, like, and comment on these videos, with limited restrictions. “I posted a video of me doing a handstand for fun, not thinking anything of it. Once checking back on the app after several hours I had gained thousands of followers and had hundreds of thousands of views on my video. I received texts and had people commenting on me being “TikTok famous” the next day at school,” junior Eleni Jones said.
The videos posted on TikTok may or may not end up on the “for you” page, a page with the most popular and most viewed videos posted on TikTok. Once on the “for you” page, your video ends up on hundreds of accounts. The more people like your video, the more accounts your video ends up on. This is usually where the TikTok fame comes from. “A lot of my videos have ended up on the ‘for you’ page and received hundreds of likes as well as thousands of views,” senior Parmida Khojee said.
