Tiktok, the new wildly popular social media app, has taken the world by storm over the past few years. The app offers users the ability to make 15-60 second videos about virtually anything they want. The app has been downloaded over 2 billion times, with over 689 million monthly users on average. Many of Tiktok’s users are young, 62% of people that use the app in the U.S. alone are between the ages of 10 and 29 years old.  According to a study conducted in March 2021, 25 % of all Tiktok users in the U.S are teenagers. 

“I downloaded it in like early 2019, and have had it on my phone ever since,” A-West sophomore Yency Alvino says.

“I got pretty addicted to it back when quarantine started just because I had nothing else to do but watch Tiktoks. It was just something entertaining that I could do to waste some time. I probably spent a good hour or maybe even longer on that app a day,” says Alvino.

Alvino, along with many other teenagers, got hooked on Tiktok back when quarantine was still in its early stages in 2020 and they were looking for things to take up their time. 

One study that was done in June of 2020, showed that kids ages four to 15 spent over 80 minutes per day watching TikTok. This number was an overall jump of 116 % from May 2019.

A-West sophomore Gavin Watson was also one of Tiktok’s millions of users up until recently. 

“I had TikTok on my phone for a long time. I would get on it every day for I don’t even know how long. But I actually just deleted it recently because it was pretty much taking over my life,” Watson says.

Watson explains why he deleted the app in that “My grades started to get a little worse because I would just be on Tiktok instead of doing my homework, and the app is just toxic in general so I finally decided to delete it about a month ago.”  

Although TikTok has become one of the most addicting apps in recent history, it can still offer its users some positive outlook.

“Tiktok has actually taught me a lot of useful things. Like sometimes I’ll just be scrolling on my for you page and a video will pop up of a guy giving some useful tips on school, or sports, or something like that. So not everything on Tiktok is bad, at least for me,” Alvino exclaims.

Tiktok has taken over the social media world and is still on the rise. It has accumulated millions of users worldwide in several nations. And with a large portion of its following being young adults, it will be interesting to see how this app and its 60-second videos will have an effect on the lives of its everyday users.