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TikTok is not always TOP

Reporting from an online parent meeting of parents and teenagers who are consumers of tiktok services

Agatha Nilsson, mother of two boys. “When my kids said they wanted to chat with their classmates on TikTok, I said wait a minute, I need to learn more about this opportunity. TikTok was created by ByteDance, a Chinese IT company. It also owns the well-known news portal Tutiao and a number of other developments (Xigua Video, TopVideo, BuzzVideo). In 2016, ByteDance released the Douyin app to the Chinese market. The success of the new development was not long in coming, and a year later the company entered the vastness of the world Internet, creating the very TikTok. Now both applications exist independently of each other, as national and international alternatives to the same development. in 2017, it surpassed Instagram and Facebook in the number of downloads, breaking the threshold of two billion. But despite the impressive numbers, many have never even heard of the app’s existence. According to Oberlo statistics, TikTok has a fairly narrow audience: from 14 to 24 years old. The popularity among young people is explained by the clip format and rapidly changing content. The maximum length of a video on TikTok is only a minute, and most videos fit even within 15 seconds. It is much easier for the modern generation Z to “swallow” this format, since their attention span is several times shorter. The active global audience of TikTok at the end of October was 500 million users. “

Igor Myasin, entrepreneur, father of an 11-year-old daughter and a 14-year-old son

“Thank you, a lot of useful information, I will add that analysts recorded growth by 15% compared to the 4th quarter and by 440% compared to last year. My son said that it is unlikely that my mother and I would understand young people, because the content is unique and will hardly be immediately understandable to a person “from the outside”, there you can find videos with any topic, from cute animals to singing lessons, but videos of ordinary content still prevail : trivial dances, challenges and parodies And, indeed, my wife and I do not like many videos where TikTokers expose their external merits or material well-being, this negatively affects the self-esteem of children, peers, and, unfortunately, this is where TikTok’s problems only begin . ”

Svetlana Sazhina, grandmother of two grandchildren

“The words ‘addiction’ and ‘social media’ have already become synonymous in the modern world, but TikTok’s success in addiction is phenomenal. Unlike other similar sites, posts on TikTok are not limited to user subscriptions and therefore never end. The tape is essentially endless. To create such an addictive “black hole”, it seems to me that the social network TikTok is a real information weapon. If society managed to close its eyes to everything else, reluctantly, the public opened its eyes to the biggest problem of TikTok. Everyone is afraid for their personal data, the security of which the social network willingly neglects. The site states that it stores user information such as mobile operators, unique identifiers of mobile devices, patterns in keystrokes, location, etc.

Igor Vasiliev, builder, father of three teenage sons

“I often have to travel and work abroad and I love TikTok, a service where kids post short videos with overlaid music. It is most important to keep within 1 minute (but more often in 15 seconds), getting the rhythm and words of the clipping from the song. It used to be musical.ly, but merged with the purely Chinese Douyin to create the international version of TikTok. The purpose of the service is to help users share their creativity, knowledge and fun moments. Children have mastered the available functions: masks, filters, stickers, face enhancers, a huge library of free tracks, tools for editing, gluing and duplicating videos, the ability to broadcast live, the ability to record reactions to videos. Our family is happy, children are busy and develop. ”

Alexander Novikov, great-grandfather worried about the impact of the TikTok network