Voices: America’s loss, our gain: Britain’s TikTok revolution starts now
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With TikTok blocked in the US, the UK has an opportunity to reshape the platform with British humour, creativity and quirks, says Flic Everett. Quickly – get your recipes for whipped feta and peanut butter quiche downloaded, learn to create a perfect French braid, and laugh uproariously at the guy pretending to skateboard into a crate of chickens. Maybe even follow an ’80s make-up tutorial and admire someone’s coffee with a cat drawn in the foam. Because America has lost TikTok, and we might never see the like again.
While YouTube has become a drunk tank of conspiracy theorists shouting at each other about the moon, X (formerly known as Twitter) is a sinkhole crawling with low beasts of the Earth, and Facebook is for your aunts to post in their cottage-core crafts group, TikTok is for the young. We’re now in an era where Gen Z have grown up scrolling hourly through comedy clips, budget plans, funny dogs, weird food and spectacular sporting fails, and their minds have been trained to function like the analogue flip-books older generations used to make, where an energetic stickman would gallop through a variety of activities and poses in milliseconds.
There’s no time to pause; TikTok runs like a never-ending movie of an unmedicated ADHD brain, where everyone in the world can post a five-second clip of themselves doing something, with very little regard for what it is. If it hadn’t gone with TikTok, it could have been called ‘Mummy, watch me!’.
As of Sunday, however, it’s not quite everyone in the world. TikTok has been switched off in America for fear of allowing its home, China, access to Western user data and the possibility that it will be used to “manipulate beliefs”. We can only hope Trump will do the same if a fun, video-sharing site called Prav-data, based in Moscow, launches soon. As is usual for the ever-swerving Trump, of course, he’s now “looking into it” and might “delay the ban” in the hope that a US buyer will be found for the site.
