Locked up at home, bored and with too much free time. For many teenagers, even Netflix is no longer a consolation when they have consumed the bulk of the fashion series and their gazes necessarily turn to mobiles. Instagram is always a good alternative, but it is not Mark Zuckerberg’s popular social network that is taking the cat to water in full confinement, but TikTok. What exactly is this phenomenon that is shooting up its user numbers? It is a network in which its users record videos of a few seconds and share them among their followers; Described like this, it could be deduced that TikTok is just another social network, but once installed on the mobile and after letting a couple of videos play, the sensations are completely different.
TikTok hooks you from the first second and it does so thanks to two factors that are proving unbeatable: its successive playback and a frankly efficient algorithm. With regard to its reproduction system, without becoming automatic, the network offers easy and fast entertainment, ideal for moments of waiting. His videos of just fifteen seconds are a perfect pastime and seen one, with a simple touch of the finger you have access to the next. But this operation would not be enough if the content displayed is not of interest to the user and this is where the magic of the algorithm comes into play. TikTok offers in the user’s account content that is easy to consume and previously chewed by the internal ‘brain’ of the system.
Very successful mini clips
The magic of this network is that anyone can become a celeb star From overnight. There are no prerequisites and starting from scratch doesn’t matter too much, unlike other networks in which the user must gain the trust of a large number of followers to achieve visibility, as is the case on Instagram or Twitter. Although TikTok has not officially detailed the keys to its success, the system works as follows: it shows its subscribers the videos of the people they follow, but it also cleverly inserts new clips from users who barely have any followers. This is where the magic works. If these new streams are successful (measured in number of interactions and watch time), they are automatically promoted so that a newbie can reach millionaire heights in a few hours.
The advantage of this network is that it already has a vast number of users who, for a mere matter of quantity, manage to sharpen the shot a lot. This is precisely what happened to Lara Martín, a teenager from Madrid who admits that success came to her unexpectedly when she used TikTok to entertain herself: “one day I uploaded a video that went viral and motivated me to continue doing what I liked. ”. The young woman happily drags the weight of her almost 108,000 followers achieved in record time. This tiktoker with the user lalaricius plays skilfully with two tricks that lay the foundations for the network’s success: music and humour. dances, versioned, little gags… anything goes, but possibly the difference between a successful account and one without it, beyond chance, lies in the work. “I record the same video several times to choose the one I like the most and then I edit them,” he admits to EL PAÍS Retina.
Overexposed teens?
Lara’s blazing stardom caught her parents off guard. “I don’t remember it very well but two years ago she came running screaming to show it to me. She had uploaded a video that had a lot of followers”, explains her mother, Sara, “from that day her followers began to upload and until now”. There are more than one hundred thousand people who could potentially be watching what their youngest daughter records at home, but her parents do not lose control of the content. Are there rules about what to upload and what not?: “Of course and if not He does it, he knows that he can stay without a mobile for a while”, he confesses.
But TikTok is much more than humorous clips and dances. The temptation to achieve ‘I like you’ at breakneck speeds means that many users are tempted to show their bodies bordering the limits of the network’s rules. Necklines, butts and even erections offer the darkest side of TikTok and the one that should alert parents of minors. It’s an ‘anything goes’ that can endanger teens. “Once a video is uploaded, control is lost,” explains Borja Adsuara, an expert lawyer in digital law, warning of the possible lack of awareness on the part of a minor. In this case, Adsuara reminds parents that the law protects them if they supervise their children’s mobiles and computers “if they have indications” of any criminal conduct. All in all, this expert suggests that parents foster “a climate of trust” with their children, “that they talk a lot and make it clear that any video they upload can turn against them.”
More radical is Escarlata Gutiérrez, prosecutor attached to the section against computer crime, who recommends “not allowing minors to use social networks with open profiles.” this expert, very active on twitterwarns that in many cases “content from open social networks is used with pornographic material”, or what is the same, that the innocent TikTok video of a minor can end up circulating on the darkest side of the network without the knowledge of the minor or his parents.
Millionaire audience and getting older
Meanwhile, TikTok continues to accumulate thousands of users around the globe and in Spain the confinement is causing the network to sneak into thousands of homes with popular hashtag such as #YoMeQuedoEnCasa, which accumulates more than 3 billion views or #AplausoSanitario that exceeds twenty million impacts. This flood of users has motivated TikTok to choose to reduce the quality of the videos to avoid network saturation, while increasing security measures have been adopted to protect the youngest, such as disabling direct messages to users. under 16 years old.
But possibly the most interesting fact about this dazzling social network is the profile of its users, who are getting older and older. The challenges posed in his videos – known as challenge— have caused the unexpected landing on TikTok of famous resorts such as Cristina Pedroche or Sergio Ramos himself, and this step is nothing but the prelude to the entry of older users of the network. In this sense, according to Ferrán Lalueza, professor of Information Sciences at the Overta University of Catalonia (UOC), “celebrities with a presence on TikTok are nothing more than the spearhead of this adult landing”, since according to his evaluation “in social networks, adolescents are the ones who set trends and then adults join in because they want to be fashionable or pretend they are”.
What age group are we referring to? Precisely the so-called boomers , those who are now over fifty years old; a totally unexpected audience in a network dominated by the so-called generation Z. And this new profile of users, unlike the younger ones, manage to gain ‘likes’ based on naturalness and providing added value, like the math teacher Carlos Maxi who already has more than 140,000 followers on his channel.