Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Social media started to play a role in geopolitical events with the Arab Spring. Back then, it meant Facebook and Twitter. Today, the social media on which the Ukraine war is fought is TikTok. The Ukraine related content on TikTok is higher than any other social media. It’s almost an official channel, writes Kari Paul: “In a speech, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, appealed to “TikTokers” as a group that could help end the war. Last week, Joe Biden spoke to dozens of top users on the app in a first-of-its kind meeting to brief the influencers on the conflict in Ukraine and how the US is addressing it.”   Not everyone is happy with this though. Some are horrified at world leaders seemingly legitimizing such “frivolous” apps. Others disagree: “Many of the problems we are seeing with it today stem from this false idea that it is just a dancing app.”   Of course, like any other social media, fake content flows through TikTok as well: “Videos of unrelate...

TikTok. It’s taken the world by storm. One of the only Chinese apps to have become insanely popular globally. Matthew Brennan’s book, Attention Factory , says TikTok’s recommendation system is the differentiator.   But first, let’s see what TikTok is not. It is not a social media app, unlike Facebook or Twitter. In a social media app, you create an account (to identify yourself), then pick your “friends” or people you want to “follow”, and then the algorithm decides how to prioritize the feeds from those folks.   In TikTok, on the other hand, you don’t pick anyone as a friend or someone to follow. The algorithm decides what to show you next: it could be from literally anyone on the planet (Since you don’t tell the app whom to follow, the app isn’t restricted to showing only the videos from those people).   In fact, if you’re a new user, TikTok does not insist you create an account: “(This approach) allowed people the freedom to experience TikTok without co...