Editor’s note: As this story—the cover of our September issue—went to press, TikTok’s fate remained uncertain. We’ve updated the story with the latest news.
Everything will change in six days, when George Floyd stops breathing under the knee of a white police officer. But for now, it is May 19, an ordinary day during a global pandemic, and Brianna Blackmon is just waking up in her bedroom in Columbia, South Carolina, where she lives with her boyfriend and their blue-nose pit bull, DJ.
Blackmon showers, carefully applies powder-blue eyeshadow in the bathroom mirror, and marbles her lips with a muted sparkle gloss. The shirt she picks out is a simple crop top, on which the phrase “More Self-Love” is printed. Blackmon is a 23-year-old musician who performs under the name BJ From the Burbs. After she finishes her morning routine, she walks into her home office to record a new freestyle. The space doubles as a makeshift studio, and today’s session will be extra special. Once there, comfortably situated on the couch, Blackmon opens the TikTok app on her phone and taps Record.
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Photograph: Jessica PettwayThe night before, Blackmon got word about Blackout Day, a demonstration of solidarity among Black users on TikTok who claim the platform is unfairly censoring them. To show unity, all creators were asked to switch their avatars to an image of a Black Power fist. She wants this freestyle to be her contribution. By the sixth take, Blackmon lands on a version she’s happy with and uploads it to her 176,000 followers. Over a slow-building trap beat, she rides the bubbling momentum. “Black creators on this app have had enough,” she raps. “So we switched our pictures, put our fists up just to say what’s up.” Before long, the 53-second freestyle is doing numbers, making rounds on other users’ personal feeds—the algorithmically driven For You pages. The praise floods in.
“Go awf,” comments @vixxienewell.
“YESS!!!” says @taylorcassidyj, one of the app’s more visible Black creators.
“I have chills mama,” says @seiricean.
Adds @d_damodel: “Ayeeee ok 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥.”
Blackmon uploads three more videos throughout the day. In one, she urges followers to donate “to the collection plate in my bio” (aka her CashApp). None of them performs quite as well as the initial freestyle, but she’s satisfied and considers the day a win.
When Blackmon opens TikTok again the following morning—“to check my views,” she says—she realizes something has gone wrong. Her freestyle post is still there, but it’s now silent. The audio has been completely removed. In her three months on the app, it’s a first. “You know how you get an instinct where you’re like, ‘That’s not right’?” Blackmon tells me in June, when we talk by phone. “That one did not sit well with my spirit.”
TikTok often mutes posts for violating its community guidelines, but Blackmon isn’t told which guideline she violated. As is typical in these cases, she’s given no explanation or notice of any kind. She reflects back on the video—no cursing, no hate speech, nothing too controversial. When she looks for a way to appeal the decision, she can’t find one. She’s left only with a suspicion, a taste of something bitter. “It’s not just me,” Blackmon says. “They are picking on certain types of creators.”
The following day, sans makeup, Blackmon uploads another video, done in one off-the-cuff take. “Isn’t this funny—TikTok doesn’t silence Black creators?” she says in a mocking tone. “Then why did they take my sound down from my video, from my pro-Black rap that went viral yesterday? I wonder.” It was almost too absurd. Blackmon made a video protesting censorship—and was censored. Is this what it meant to be Black and unapologetic on TikTok?
TikTok has an irresistible draw. In my casual use, I often find myself spellbound by its gonzo humor and mini-blockbusters, full of conceptual daring. The app’s directive, it seems, is to optimize happiness. But something lurks beneath the gloss. As TikTok has grown to more than 800 million users, it has begun to mirror the larger world: the quirks, passions, and prejudices of the people who have started to populate and influence the form. I’d heard stories like Blackmon’s, bits and pieces of discouragement and grievance, but I wanted to understand it fully. So I started reaching out to TikTokers in all parts of the country, some veterans of the app, others new to it, to learn about their experiences, to see what was going on.
Over a period of two months, I heard from 29 Black creators who shared stories about muted posts, in-app harassment, and incidents of racism. They said the problems on the app are deeper and more widespread than simple isolated incidents. “Ever since I joined I’ve felt like the app is against me,” one told me. Another added, “It’s disgusting how much they have allowed to go unchecked.” Together, their experiences belie the perception of TikTok as an app of joy and creativity, revealing instead a place tangled up in an ancient pain—a site of blurred visions and youthful ignorances, where flattery quickly turns into mockery, mockery into theft, and theft into something altogether more disturbing.
TikTok is Generation Z. It is both the most exciting cultural product of this time and also at grave risk of alienating the very people it needs to succeed.
Photograph: Jessica PettwayBefore she made it big on TikTok, Blackmon had built modest followings on other platforms. On YouTube, she posted videos about her life in a series she called STORYTIME. She talked about getting married at 19 (she’s since divorced) and the time she tried (and failed, hilariously) to work as a stripper. Building an audience on Instagram proved harder. “You have to be on vacation,” Blackmon says, “or doing something extravagant,” which she wasn’t. She didn’t feel as if she could be herself.
Another app Blackmon checked out, but only as a spectator, was Vine. Launched in 2013, Vine was TikTok before TikTok. With a remarkably simple premise—upload six-second videos that would loop infinitely—Vine appealed to a dopamine-crazed culture that desired virality in short, repetitive bursts.
But the real allure of the app could be traced, in large part, to the ingenuity of the Black creators who made much of its most irresistible content. Bought by Twitter in 2012, Vine became the dominant engine of Black culture on the internet from around 2014 to 2016. It rivaled Twitter in its capacity to incubate trends, hyping Southern dance crazes such as the Nae Nae and career-boosting comedians like King Bach. “I was there for the short comedy,” Blackmon says. Arguably Vine’s biggest impact was how it mainstreamed Black slang. In one of the most recognized Vines during that period, 16-year-old Kayla Newman—best known by her alias, Peaches Monroee—delights in her own fabulousness. “On fleek” was born, and The Culture adjusted accordingly.
The app eventually went bust. Its success led competitors, like Instagram, to create their own video features. And unlike YouTube, Vine never figured out a way to share revenue with users; a deal to pay top creators to produce content fell through in 2015. Big names departed the platform, and revenues dwindled. In 2017, Twitter shut down Vine, and it was mourned largely by millennials and Gen Zers who’d made a home on the platform.
Around that time, ByteDance, a Beijing-based tech company at the forefront of Chinese social media, was launching an app called Douyin. In the early days, it was used to create homemade music videos, but users quickly turned it into a marketplace for all sorts of short-form content. By 2018, ByteDance had released the app outside China, acquired the lip-sync app Musical.ly, and renamed the international version TikTok. Vine supercharged—videos were now capped at 15 seconds, and later 60—TikTok also offered a suite of editing tools, from filters to green-screen special effects, that gave creators near-limitless possibilities.
In the beginning, TikTok’s embrace of wackiness and absence of anything even marginally serious was its prime attraction, and its most marketable one. Twitter was preoccupied with millennial bickering; the election of Donald Trump turned Facebook into a political echo chamber; Instagram felt plastic; gamers ran Twitch. On TikTok, kids just wanted to have fun. It was a place for dance challenges and wellness how-tos, movie reviews and the kind of existence-pondering comedy sketches BoJack Horseman might post were he on the app (or real). The platform elevated creativity and experimentation above all else; its algorithm, as Blackmon puts it, is generous. Though personalized based on user activity, For You feeds retain a light randomness—according to TikTok, the algorithm tries to avoid duplicating content or privileging accounts with large followings. As Blackmon says, “it’s