TikTok is an undeniable force in our society. It has the power to launch music careers, house the homeless, and unite people worldwide. It is an app where anyone can go viral for any reason, not just because they have the right followers. It is also the first Chinese social media app to take over the United States. TikTok’s geopolitical implications are certainly worth exploring, but its social impact is arguably more significant — yet director Shalini Kantayya (“Coded Bias”) uses her documentary “TikTok, Boom” to merely gesture at the latter issue.
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That wouldn’t be such a problem if Kantayya framed her documentary solely around subjects who could speak to those political issues. Instead, she relies primarily on academic and journalistic experts to talk geopolitics, with an occasional glimpse at China’s version of the app, Douyin. The actual TikTok users she focuses on are a bizarre bunch. Only one of them — Feroza Aziz — has any explicit experience with the app’s Chinese censorship policies. The other two are Deja Foxx, a 16-year-old American political activist, and Spencer X, a wildly apolitical beatboxer. Aziz has about 171,000 followers on the app, and Foxx has almost 82,000 — relatively small numbers by TikTok standards. Spencer X, meanwhile, has nearly 55 million followers.
Depicting a mainstream success like Spencer X alongside Aziz and Foxx might have yielded interesting commentary about influencer culture and online activism. Still, if it did, Kantayya didn’t include that in her documentary. Instead, she acts as though Aziz and Foxx have comparable reach to Spencer X, which, even on TikTok’s seemingly democratic For You page, simply isn’t true. As a result, Spencer X serves as little more than a strange diversion, moaning about the trials of life as a beatboxer while Aziz talks about Uyghur concentration camps.
Chinese censorship and data mining take center stage in this film, while what it’s like to actually use the app feels more like an afterthought. This is no clearer than when “TikTok, Boom” promotes an absolute falsehood: One of its experts, an activist working for privacy rights, states that minors are especially at risk on TikTok, where any predator can easily access them via DM. In fact, most TikTok accounts only allow messages from mutuals.
That the documentary spends more time on this distortion than it does the app’s gamified sexualization and self-objectification, which is far more prevalent and concerning, shows its considerable blind spots. In fact, the film goes out of its way to neutralize the way TikTok rewards young women who objectify themselves, crediting Foxx’s online success to her skimpy outfits. Cinematographer Steve Acevedo even lingers on shots of Foxx, who can’t be older than 21, sunbathing in a bikini.
To have a conversation about TikTok and censorship while barely nodding to the social impact, it has on its users feels, at best, absurd. Perhaps “TikTok, Boom” will appeal to non-users interested in the ongoing cage match between ByteDance and Silicon Valley. Still, for the ever-increasing number of us logging hours on the app every day, this film barely scratches the surface. [D]
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