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Don’t look now, but after half a decade of transforming public life on an international scale, TikTok may finally be entering its flop era.
The clues are there if you know where to look, even outside the millions of videos that have lapsed into total silence since Universal Music Group yanked its vast catalog from the app, including Taylor Swift, J Balvin, your favorite city pop pioneers, and so many others. The professed reason was to deny the app a chance to train artificial intelligence on commercial music without compensating artists—which, fair enough. Yet it’s not just the songs that have left these videos; it’s the entire audio altogether, leading to the loss of creator narration on both old and new TikToks.
Then, there’s also the sharp slowdown in user growth over the past year, widespread annoyance with its ad-heavy push into e-commerce via the “TikTok Shop,” impatience with its never-ending deluge of A.I.–generated spam and misinformation, exhaustion with the homogenizing effects of TikTok trends and aesthetics, increased apprehension over its demeaning A.I.–powered face filters, outrage at its rumormongering automated-search suggestions, and concern over the heightened prevalence of conspiratorial “health”-focused influencers. Turmoil is coming from inside the house too, with layoffs and a gender-discrimination lawsuit hitting both TikTok and its parent company—the latter of which reported significant drops in revenue growth and overall valuation at the tail end of 2023. Oh, and: President Joe Biden has finally joined the app to reach the youths. The result is as cringe as it sounds, as my colleague Scott Nover pointed out.
TikTok is not anywhere near dead or dying; it’s more that you can sense a less-than-ideal vibe shift on the platform. With its revenue increasingly driven by consumer spending, you can expect TikTok to push even harder into Shop-like ventures, through exclusive subscription spaces or paid-for benefits like the ability to upload longer videos, even as it continues to slash its already-measly payouts to videomakers and musicians. Because, even though the app still takes in heaping amounts of ad revenue, its new request for agencies to increase their app spending isn’t going over great with advertising executives. That may be thanks, in part, to the geopolitical firestorms occurring even outside home nation China: The app’s image-making prowess is universally credited with assisting the recent electoral successes of strongmen in the Philippines, Argentina, and Indonesia. It’s a rickety situation in the United States as well: Politicians like Sen. John Fetterman, who once actively courted the app’s many youth organizers, are now parroting unfounded talking points about how TikTok is turning those very activists into Hamas surrogates. (Fetterman has not posted any new videos to his profile since making those comments in December.)
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Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo/Slate
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