Go meme yourself

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When Facebook and Instagram briefly went down last week, Twitter users welcomed Mark Zuckerberg devotees to their preferred platform. But Twitter is a dark place, full of political jabs and jokes you won’t get until you understand several layers of Internet culture.

For social media users who want the personability and livestream features of Facebook and Instagram, the quick-wittedness of Twitter, and none of the political memes, there’s a new social media app on the rise: TikTok.

As with the emergence of most other online social platforms, it’s mostly used by people under the age of 24. Like the now-defunct app Vine, it allows you to share short videos with your friends. But where Vine capped the clips at six seconds, TikTok allows you to film up to 15 seconds of video, adding filters or music or even livestreaming.

The app has 500 million users across the world, many of them in the U.S. and China, where it was developed. In November 2017, Beijing-based tech company ByteDance bought Musical.ly, a similar app, then merged it with TikTok last August.

Since then, the app has been downloaded more than a billion times, surpassing other platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube in download numbers for the month of September.

To get a sense of what the app is like, consider Jimmy Fallon’s TikTok-geared #TumbleweedChallenge. Last fall, he asked viewers to film themselves dropping to the floor and rolling around like a tumbleweed every time a western song began to play.

It gets weirder. Like Snapchat and Instagram, TikTok provides users with the option to overlay filters on their faces. You could lip sync to Drake’s “In My Feelings,” or you could do it while an animated husky dog replaces your face.

Kids seem to love it, but the Federal Trade Commission does not. Last month, TikTok paid a $5.7 million settlement to the FTC for violating its rules on collecting data from kids under the age of 13. No company has ever had to pay the FTC more for violating children’s privacy.

With its option to monetize livestreams — viewers can send you “gifts” that you can convert to cash — the app is an opportunity less for creative communication than for the Instagram-influencer set. TikTok also overlays its logo on popular videos to advertise the diverse content on its platform, so there’s always the chance to go viral.

Of course, instant Internet fame is possible through all social media platforms. But with its reliance on trendy dance moves and a why-are-you-doing-this, cringe factor, none but TikTok makes it so easy to meme yourself.

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