User:Ssblee98/TikTok

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 * Name of article: TikTok
 * I've chose to do this article on TikTok because the usage of this app around us has been rising rapidly and I wanted to see the reason behind this absurd app.

TikTok
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Tick tock.

''"Douyin" redirects here. It is not to be confused with doujin''

This article is about the current Worldwide trending app that is catching everyone's attention, TikTok.

TikTok is an iOS and Android social media video app for creating and sharing short lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos. The app was launched in 2017 by Chinese developer ByteDance, for markets outside of China. ByteDance, a Beijing-based company founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming, had previously launched Douyin for the China market in September 2016. TikTok and Douyin are the same but run on different servers to comply with Chinese censorship restrictions. The application allows users to create short music and lip-sync videos of 3 to 15 seconds and short looping videos of 3 to 60 seconds. It is popular in Asia, the United States, and other parts of the world. TikTok is not available in China, and its servers are based in countries where the app is available.

TikTok was the most downloaded app in the US in October 2018, the first Chinese app to achieve this. As of 2018, it is available in over 150 markets and in 75 languages. In February 2019, TikTok, together with Douyin, hit one billion downloads globally, excluding Android installs in China.

Evolution
Douyin was launched by ByteDance in China in September 2016. Douyin was developed in 200 days, and within a year got 100 million users, with more than 1 billion videos viewed every day, mostly by the Chinese. It is called "TikTok" because Douyin in Chinese translated to "vibrating sound". TikTok was launched in the international market in September 2017. On 23 January 2018, the TikTok app ranked #1 among free mobile app downloads on app stores in Thailand and other countries. In September 2018, TikTok exceeded the number of downloads to many popular social media apps, such as Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and Youtube.

TikTok has been downloaded about 80 million times in the United States, and 800 million times worldwide, according to data from mobile research firm Sensor Tower that excludes Android users in China. Celebrities including Jimmy Fallon and Tony Hawk have joined the app in November 2018. Now, more top celebrities such as Will Smith, Marshmello, Ariana Grande, Cardi B, and many more has joined the TikTok community and started doing worldwide trending challenges.

On September 3, 2019, TikTok and the NFL announced a multi-year partnership. The partnership includes the launch of an official NFL account that will bring NFL content to worldwide fans.

Origins
When TikTok was launched, it was not the first of its own kind. It was a repetition of an already existing popular app, Musical.ly, a startup based in Shanhai with an office in Santa Monica, California, owning a popular social media platform targeting the US teenage market. Musical.ly was a social media video platform that allowed users to create short lip-sync and comedy videos. Its official release was on August 2014. However in November of 2017, ByteDance bought Musical.ly for around $1 billion and In the August of 2018, all of Musical.ly accounts were automatically migrated to TikTok.

Expansion in other markets
As of 2018, TikTok is now available in over 150 markets, and in 75 languages. TikTok was downloaded more than 104 million times on Apple's App store during the full first half of 2018, according to data provided to CNBC by Sensor Tower, an app analytics platform based in San Francisco. It surpassed Facebook, YouTube and Instagram to become the world's most downloaded iOS app for that time period.

Douyin
As a separate app from TikTok, Douyin is available from the developer's website and has maintained the same app title since its launch in September 2016. Part of its popularity is attributable to its marketing campaigns, launching several activities with Chinese celebrities to engage their fans' interest. For example, its marketing campaign in 2018 Spring Festival Gala alone brought an increase of 70 million daily active users. In February 2018, Douyin launched a partnership with Modern Sky to monetize music.

Features
The TikTok mobile app allows users to create a short video of themselves which often feature music in the background, can be sped up, slowed down or edited with a filter. To create a music video with the app, users can choose background music from a wide variety of music genres, edit with a filter and record a 15-second video with speed adjustments before uploading it to share with others on TikTok or other social platforms. They can also film short lip-sync videos to popular songs.

The app's "react" feature allows users to film their reaction to a specific video, over which it is placed in a small window that is movable around the screen. Its "duet" feature allows users to film a video aside another video. The “duet” feature was another trademark of musical.ly

The app allows users to set their accounts as "private". Such accounts' content remains visible to TikTok, but is blocked from TikTok users who the account holder has not authorised to view their content. Users can choose whether any other user, or only their "friends", may interact with them through the app via comments, messages, or "react" or "duet" videos. Users also can set specific videos to either “public”, “friends only”, or “private” regardless if the account is private or not.

The “for you” page on TikTok is a feed of recommended videos to users based on their previous actions on the app, consisting of what kind of content they liked. Users can only be featured on the “for you” page if they are 16 or over per TikTok policy. Users under 16 will not show up under the “for you” page, under sounds, or under any hashtags.

Users can also add videos, hashtags, filters, and sounds to their “saved” section. This section is visible only to the user on their profile allowing them to refer back to any video, hashtag, filter, or sound they've previously saved.

Artificial intelligence
Without the need to ask users to manually fill in their preferences, TikTok employs artificial intelligence to analyse users' interests and preferences through their interactions with the content, and display a personalized content feed to each user.

Reception
TikTok became the world's most downloaded app on Apple's App Store in the first half of 2018 with an estimated 104 million downloads, surpassing the downloads recorded by PUBG Mobile, YouTube, WhatsApp and Instagram in the same period. Studies have shown that in just one year, short videos in China have gone up by 94.79 million.

Privacy, cyberbullying and addiction concerns
Similar to other platforms, journalists in several countries have raised privacy concerns about the app, not least because it is popular with children and may expose them to sexual predators.

Several users have reported endemic cyberbullying on TikTok, including racist abuse. In December 2019, following a report by German digital rights group Netzpolitik.org, TikTok admitted that it had suppressed videos by disabled users as well as LGBTQ users in a purported effort to limit cyberbullying.

When the app was first launched as Douyin, many users recorded videos with excessive drinking, over-eating, using firecrackers for self-harm, and other issues. Other issues would be videos about children. Some of these videos were showing obese children or mothers who have had a child at 15 years-old or younger. Some users may find it hard to stop using TikTok. In April 2018, an addiction-reduction feature was added to Douyin. This encourages users to take a break every 90 minutes. Later in 2018, the feature was rolled out to the TikTok app.

National security concerns in the US
In January 2019, an investigation by the American think tank Peterson Institute for International Economics described TikTok as a "Huawei-sized problem" that poses a national security threat to the West,  noting the app's popularity with Western users including armed forces personnel, and its ability to convey location, image and biometric data to its Chinese parent company, which is legally unable to refuse to share data to the Chinese government because of the China Internet Security Law. Observers have also noted that ByteDance's founder and CEO Zhang Yiming issued a letter in 2018 stating that his company would "further deepen cooperation" with Communist Party of China authorities to promote their policies. TikTok's parent company ByteDance claims that TikTok is not available in China and its data is stored outside of China, but its privacy policy has reserved the right to share any information with Chinese authorities. In response to national security, censorship, and anti-boycott compliance concerns, in October 2019, Senator Marco Rubio asked the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to open an investigation into TikTok and its parent company ByteDance. The same month, senators Tom Cotton and Chuck Schumer sent a joint letter to the Director of National Intelligence requesting a security review of TikTok and its parent company.

In November 2019, it was reported that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States opened an investigation into ByteDance's acquisition of musical.ly. The same month, following a request by Senator Chuck Schumer, U.S. Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy agreed to assess the risks of using TikTok as a recruitment tool. Senator Josh Hawley introduced the National Security and Personal Data Protection Act to prohibit TikTok's parent company and others from transferring personal data of Americans to China.

Censorship
On 3 July 2018, TikTok was banned in Indonesia, after the Indonesian government accused it of promulgating "pornography, inappropriate content and blasphemy." Shortly afterwards, TikTok pledged to task 20 staff with censoring TikTok content in Indonesia, and the ban was lifted on 11 July 2018.

In November 2018, the Bangladeshi government blocked the TikTok app's internet access.

Also in 2018, Douyin was reprimanded by Chinese media watchdogs for showing "unacceptable" content, such as videos depicting adolescent pregnancies.

In January 2019, the Chinese government said that it would start to hold app developers like ByteDance responsible for user content shared via apps such as Douyin, and listed 100 types of content that the Chinese government would censor. It was reported that certain content unfavorable to the Communist Party of China has already been limited for users outside of China such as content related to the 2019 Hong Kong protests. TikTok has blocked videos about human rights in China, particularly those that reference Xinjiang re-education camps and abuses of ethnic and religious minorities, and disabled the accounts of users who post them. TikTok's policies also ban content related to a specific list of foreign leaders such as Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Mahatma Gandhi. Its policies also ban content critical of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and content considered pro-Kurdish.

In February 2019, several Indian politicians called for TikTok to be banned or more tightly regulated, after concerns emerged about sexually explicit content, cyberbullying, and deepfakes.

TikTok moderators have banned content that could be perceived as being positive towards to gay people or gay rights, including same-sex couples holding hands, including in countries where homosexuality has never been illegal. Former U.S. employees of TikTok reported to The Washington Post that final decisions to remove content were made by parent company employees in Beijing.

In response to censorship concerns, TikTok's parent company hired K&L Gates, including former Congressmen Bart Gordon and Jeff Denham, to advise it on its content moderation policies. TikTok also hired lobbying firm Monument Advocacy.

In 2019, TikTok removed about two dozen accounts that were responsible of posting ISIS propaganda on the app.

On November 27, 2019, TikTok temporarily banned 17 year old Afghan-American user Feroza Aziz after Aziz posted a video, disguised as a makeup tutorial, drawing attention to the mass-incarceration of Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China. TikTok later claimed that her account was suspended as a result of human error, and her account has since been reinstated.

Users
In the three years after it launched on September 2016, TikTok had 500 million active users.

Demographics
In the US, 52% of TikTok users are iPhone users. While TikTok has a neutral gender-bias format, 44% of TikTok users are female while 56% are male. TikTok's geographical use has shown that 43% of new users are from India. TikTok has proven to attract the younger generation, as 41% of its users are between the ages of 16 and 24. Among these TikTok users, 90% say use the app on a daily basis.

User engagement
TikTok's user engagement rate is 29%. As of July 2018, TikTok users spend an average of 52 minutes a day on the app. ByteDance has stated that U.S. users open the app eight times a day and individual sessions on the app are the longest at 4.9 minutes.

Trends
There are a variety of trends within TikTok, including memes, lip-synced songs, and comedies. Duets, a feature that allows users to add their own video to an existing video with the original content's audio, have led to most of these trends.

Trends are shown on the explore page on TikTok, or the page with the search logo. The page enlists the trending hashtags and challenges among the app. Some include #posechallenge, #filterswitch, #makeeverysecondcount, #wannalisten, #pillowchallenge, #furrywar, #hitormiss, #bottlecapchallenge and more.

In June 2019, the company introduced the hash tag #Edutok which received 37 billion views. Following this development the company initiated partnerships with Edtech start ups to create educational content on the platform.

Spawning viral songs and trends
The app has spawned numerous viral trends and internet celebrities around the world, propelled songs to fame, and is known to be popular among celebrities due to its popularity and social influence. Studies have shown that in just one year, short videos in China have gone up by 94.79 million.

The most well-known viral TikTok meme in the Western world of 2018 is "hit or miss", from a snippet of iLOVEFRiDAY's "Mia Khalifa" (2018), which has been used in over four million TikTok videos, and helped introduce TikTok to a larger Western audience.

TikTok is believed to have been a major factor in making "Old Town Road" by Lil Nas X become one of the biggest songs of 2019.

Other songs that have gained popularity because of their success on TikTok are "Roxanne" by Arizona Zervas, "Lalala" by bbno$, "Stupid" by Ashnikko, "Yellow Hearts" by Ant Saunders and "Truth Hurts" by Lizzo. The platform has received some criticism, however, for its lack of royalties towards artists whose music is used on their platform.

Indonesian block
Indonesia temporarily blocked the TikTok app on 3 July 2018 amid public concern about illegal contents such as pornography and blasphemy. The app was unblocked one week later after making various changes, including removing negative content, opening a government liaison office, and implementing age restrictions and security mechanisms.

Tencent lawsuits
Tencent's WeChat platform has been accused of blocking Douyin's videos. In April 2018, Douyin sued Tencent and accused it of spreading false and damaging information on its WeChat platform, demanding RMB 1 million in compensation and an apology. In June 2018, Tencent filed a lawsuit against Toutiao and Douyin in a Beijing court, alleging they had repeatedly defamed Tencent with negative news and damaged its reputation, seeking a nominal sum of RMB 1 in compensation and a public apology. In response, Toutiao filed a complaint the following day against Tencent for allegedly unfair competition and asking for RMB 90 million in economic losses.

US COPPA fines
On 27 February 2019, the United States Federal Trade Commission fined ByteDance US$5.7 million for collecting information from minors under the age of 13 in violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. ByteDance responded by adding a kids-only mode to TikTok which blocks the upload of videos, the building of user profiles, direct messaging, and commenting on other's videos, while still allowing the viewing and recording of content.

Brief ban in India
On 3 April 2019, the Madras High Court while hearing a PIL had asked the Government of India to ban the app, citing that it "encourages pornography". The court also noted that children using the app were at risk of being targeted by sexual predators. The court further asked broadcast media not to telecast any of those videos from the app. The spokesperson for TikTok stated that they were abiding by local laws and were awaiting the copy of the court order before they take action. On 17 April, both Google and Apple removed TikTok from Google Play and the App Store. As the court refused to reconsider the ban, the company stated that they had removed over 6 million videos that violated their content policy and guidelines.

On 25 April 2019, the ban was lifted after a court in Tamil Nadu reversed its order of prohibiting downloads of the app from the App Store and Google Play, following a plea from TikTok developer Bytedance Technology. India's TikTok ban might have cost the app 15 million new users.

Data transfer class action lawsuit
In November 2019, a class action lawsuit was filed in California that alleged that TikTok "clandestinely vacuumed up and transferred" personally-identifiable information of U.S. persons to servers in China owned by Tencent and Alibaba Group.

Content Gap

 * Wikipedians often talk about "content gaps." What do you think a content gap is, and what are some possible ways to identify them? - Content gaps are missing information that are not already on the Wikipedia pages, and most of them include academic topics.
 * What are some reasons a content gap might arise? What are some ways to remedy them? - Content gap might arise due to that certain area of study not being explored enough at the time or either the content does not seem to interest other people. Some ways to remedy them are to look up on official library databases or personally ask professionals.
 * Does it matter who writes Wikipedia? No, it does not matter who writes Wikipedia pages because anyone without formal training can edit existing articles or create new ones. However, it will be viewed by many other official "Wikipedians" before it goes out on the live main stream.
 * What does it mean to be "unbiased" on Wikipedia? How is that different, or similar, to your own definition of "bias"? Being "unbiased' on Wikipedia means to be neutral, by showing no prejudice for or against something. Articles shouldn't take sides but should be able to explain the sides. It's similar to writing unbiased news articles as the editors are not able to write bias articles about significant views on a topic.

Identify the Content Gaps you will fill

 * The overall safety of the TikTok App
 * Additional information to the origins and the evolution of the app.
 * Apps that are related to TikTok but has not been recognized and the reasons behind it.
 * Additional reasons behind the huge success
 * The lawsuit that was filed against TikTok recently by a U.S. College student over the data usage.
 * The design of the app
 * The opening of national security investigation from the U.S. into TikTok
 * Additional information on the addiction of TikTok and the negative downside to it.