Due to its unmitigated use across different generations, TikTok has popularized the consumption of short-form media following its rapid rise to fame in 2018. With an algorithm that meticulously curates personalized content to keep users hooked, TikTok is the poster child for the harmful effects of social media use. As a result, the app has shouldered almost all of the blame for the short-form content that is highly addictive for users. Despite this type of content having spread to other platforms in the past few years, TikTok remains wholly liable for the origins and popularization of this shortened social media content.
After seeing TikTok generate over a billion dollars in the first half of 2020, Instagram released “Reels” in August of that year. Reels allow Instagram users to upload short-form content that is displayed in a visual format eerily similar to TikTok. These videos were initially limited to 15 seconds by Instagram, which was far shorter than TikTok’s limit of 3 minutes at the time. This 15 second limit is likely due to TikTok’s findings that the optimal and most viewed video length is 11-17 seconds. These videos are short enough to maintain users’ steady attention and keep them scrolling through content. Ultimately, the addition of Reels was Instagram’s attempt to build an even more addictive and profitable platform after viewing TikTok’s success.
This attempt proved successful as Instagram’s mercenary-like ventures significantly increased monthly active users by 700 million people in the subsequent year — which is more than the previous three years combined. Although pandemic-related isolation certainly might have played a role in this growth, TikTok’s active users only increased by 200 million in that same year. In other words, Instagram exponentially boosted its user base and revenue by expanding the addictive grip of short-form content to hundreds of millions of people.
Behind these changes is Meta, Instagram’s parent company formerly known as Facebook. The Facebook social media platform was released in 2004 and continues to dominate the social media sphere as the only platform with over 3 billion users. The Meta company has been under scrutiny over the years due to public concerns over data security and privacy but received very little criticism for its malevolent social media practices until two weeks ago during a U.S. Senate hearing on child exploitation. The hearing sought to uncover the deceitful practices of many large social media companies, featuring both Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, along with the CEOs of Discord, Snapchat, and X.
One of the hearing’s main focuses was to firmly denounce Chew’s company as a data aggregate for the Chinese government. Meanwhile, more popular social media companies like YouTube have never been questioned with such hostility. While TikTok certainly deserves criticism for its exploitation of the addictive nature of short form media, the public’s tunnel-vision shields other social media companies from similar scrutiny. This has allowed other huge corporations like Instagram and YouTube to exploit TikTok’s model and profit off short-form content in an even more malicious way. As such, it is time we criticize these companies with the same conviction and hold them legally accountable.
Although this criticism and legal attention does bode well for the successful implementation of social media regulation, it was also very revealing of the skewed public perceptions of these platforms. For example, Chew faced the most personal attacks by far and was repeatedly pestered with questions about associations with the Chinese Communist Party, despite being Singaporean. This political spitefulness, which is completely unrelated to the hearing’s supposed focus on “child exploitation,” made it clear that TikTok was viewed as the main antagonist. However, these other social media giants are more than just side characters.
One company notably absent from the hearing was YouTube, which has had nine years of a practically unopposed reign built on a false persona of trustworthiness. For example, a survey of the American public found that they trust YouTube more than WhatsApp, with the latter being nothing more than an encrypted messaging app. However, among all the leaders in short-form content, YouTube has the most damaging infrastructure in place. YouTube was released five years before Instagram and 10 years before TikTok, so it likely has collected billions, if not trillions, more data points. As such, they have far more resources in the quest to build the most addictive short-form content interface and were able to release “Youtube Shorts” within a month of Reels. In other words, YouTube and Meta have both taken TikTok’s model and infused it with about 3 billion users each, an extra decade’s worth of data, and even more fine-tuned algorithms.
This does not exonerate TikTok in any way, as there are certainly aspects that make it a particularly harmful platform. For example, many of the trends on the app put pressure on impressionable youth to do reckless and illogical things, such as the “Borg challenge” and the resurgence of the “Tide Pod challenge” that took the world by storm. This merely acknowledges other platforms are equally, if not more dangerous, yet attract half the scrutiny. Instagram and YouTube have a far larger reach than TikTok ever has, and the failure to realize this will cement the perils of social media for every generation that follows.
