Tik Tok and the Diffusion Theory

Tik Tok is one of the newer social media platforms for people of all ages. The app has amassed around 850 million users and has been downloaded over 2 billion times. (The chart featured below gives a visual to the apps quarterly downloads) It is a video social app to share and watch short videos that range from 3 to 60 seconds. Users create the app's content; it has a wide variety of video categories from dancing and singing, to comedy, to cooking, and education. The app was created in 2016 by a Chinese company, ByteDance, but was not released in America and other countries until 2017 when it launched with another media service, Musical.ly, and became available for Iphones and Androids. 

Individuals go through a five step process when adopting a new idea or product, this is known as the diffusion theory. The first step in the process is awareness. With Tik Tok a lot of the younger kids in Generation Z were the early adopters of the app, joining as early as 2017. I was a late adopter because I always thought the app was just for dancing and did not join until the Spring of 2020. Some Americans are not adopters at all because Tik Tok is a Chinese governed app and they are afraid that America cannot protect their personal security and information. In August of 2020 Donald Trump threatened to ban Tik Tok because it was owned by a Chinese company and our government was afraid of American data being shared. This move was made to scare the Chinese company and pressure them into selling it’s US assets to an American company.

Sources:

https://www.npr.org/2020/08/06/900019185/trump-signs-executive-order-that-will-effectively-ban-use-of-tiktok-in-the-u-s

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53476117