Sundance review: 'TikTok, Boom' is a great guide for grown-ups trying to figure out what their kids are watching — and why it matters
Essential viewing for parents who want to know what their teens are watching on their phones, the documentary “TikTok, Boom” is a solid lesson in what the social-media app does and why it’s generated such opposition in Washington and Silicon Valley.
The basics, for those who don’t know: TikTok is a video-heavy social media platform that has had more than 2 billion mobile downloads worldwide (as of October 2020). It was started in 2016 by the Chinese company ByteDance, first marketed in China under the name Douyin (which is what it’s called in China today). In 2018, ByteDance merged a version of Douyin with the app Musical.ly, and TikTok was born.
As covered by director Shalini Kantayya (who explored racism by algorithm in the 2020 Sundance doc “Coded Bias”), TikTok’s secret sauce is using data collection from every second a user watches any video, and running through an algorithm that predicts what the user is most likely to want to watch next — which it posted to the app’s “For You” page.
The algorithm’s accuracy is uncanny. As one TikTok poster shown in the documentary says, “Are any other girls, like, kinda aggravated that it took more than 20 years to figure out we were bisexual, but it took my TikTok algorithm, like, 37 seconds?”
With popularity, though, comes criticism. The experts Kantayya interviews note that TikTok isn’t a creation of Silicon Valley, but of China — and many have shown concern that a Chinese firm could be collecting data on so many people, particularly teens. (Currently, data from TikTok in the United States is collected in the U.S., with a backup in Singapore; no U.S. data is stored in China, executives for the company say.)
The movie suggests that TikTok was a convenient punching bag for Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, to throw congressional watchdogs off of his scent. And it was a juicy target for Donald Trump, along with all things Chinese, as a distraction from his lethal bungling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The most interesting stories told in “TikTok, Boom” are from content producers for the app itself. There’s Feroza Aziz, an Afghan-American teen who connected with thousands of others from Afghanistan — until her account was suspended because she made mention of the genocide of Uyghurs in China. There’s Deja Foxx, who went viral when she challenged former Sen. Jeff Flake about Planned Parenthood in a town hall, and parlayed that into videos and political activism. And there’s Spencer X, a beat-boxer who built a fortune out of his videos, and risked losing it all when Trump attempted to ban TikTok in the United States.
The problem with a documentary like “TikTok, Boom” is that its shelf life is as short as the app’s. By the time this movie gets out to a general audience, it’s quite possible that the next social-media platform will already be trying to replace it.
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‘TikTok, Boom’
★★★
Premiered Sunday, January 23, and screened again Tuesday, January 25, in the U.S. Documentary competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. No more screenings scheduled on the festival portal. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language and some sexual content. Running time: 90 minutes.