Late last month, Jason Derulo, musician and star of Cats (2019) best known in many corners of the internet for falling down the stairs, claimed in an interview with Kick Game that he made TikTok what it is today.
Specifically, he said, “TikTok used to be just a dance app, and it wasn’t until I started to introduce other things that it became the app that it is today.” He goes on to add, “To this day TikTok pays me…” before cutting himself off, realising he probably shouldn’t divulge exact numbers.
At the time of writing, Derulo is the 14th-most followed person on the app, behind genuine household names like The Rock and Will Smith, YouTubers like MrBeast, and those who made a name for themselves on TikTok like Khaby Lane, Charli D’Amelio, Bella Poarch and Addison Rae. Since joining TikTok back when it was Musical.ly in 2016, Derulo’s videos have garnered 1.2 billion likes, which sounds like an impressive achievement, until you realise Charli D’Amelio’s have received 11.3 billion, and she didn’t join the app with an existing fan base from a decade-long music career.
Derulo’s claim to have been a pioneer in changing the nature of TikTok from a lip syncing and dancing app to a more generalised video sharing app beggars belief. It suggests he doesn’t understand the way social media platforms change according to their users’ needs and habits over time, rather than as the result of the actions of one famous user.
The Twitter equivalent would be Ashton Kutcher, who was the first Twitter user to reach a million followers back in 2009, claiming that this achievement transformed how people used Twitter. Major events like Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring and later, the Black Lives Matter protests, had far more of an impact on the culture of Twitter and the way it was used than the actions of any one person, not to mention groups of Twitter users like Black Twitter or Irony Twitter that contributed to the culture that endures even under Musk’s tenure.
The same can be said for TikTok. For many of the most-followed TikTokers, they grew up on the app, and their audiences grew alongside them — changes to the kind of content they posted were inevitable as they matured and their interests changed. Knowing teenagers (having been one previously), there is a less than zero chance any of them were taking cues from the “Whatcha Say” guy when looking for ideas of what to post. Indeed, many of his videos are regularly criticised for lacking spontaneity and being heavily edited; much like Vine before it, the best viral videos have the appearance of spontaneity and relatability. Nobody wants to see celebrities blasting off into the sky with superpowers — if they did, they’d just watch a Marvel movie.
Several TikTokers responded to Derulo’s claims imploring the singer to humble himself. Stinky Asher, who has over 4.5 million followers, said Tiktok would “literally be nothing right now” if not for the OG ‘ironic’ TikTokers who called the app home in 2018/19, of which he was one. He argues that this group made it less embarrassing to be seen using and posting on TikTok, and that ironic TikTok compilations could be found all over YouTube and Instagram during this time, helping drive new users to the app.
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These relatively early posters, as well as those who joined the app to view their content, were what I’d call “Vine refugees” - teenagers who loved and used Vine before it was shut down for good in early 2017. These users were cast adrift following Vine’s discontinuation, and TikTok, also a video app, had more in common with Vine than any of the other potential social media homes available to them. These users were never joining TikTok to watch the D’Amelio sisters dance or post their own dance videos; they wanted something that filled the void left behind by Vine.
Another user, Sarah, who goes by shreksdumpster on the app and has over 2.5 million followers, argued that the people who built TikTok were old Musical.ly users who stuck around after the merger and the ironic TikTokers described by Stinky Asher. In her video, she explained that back when TikTok was seen as “cringe”, it also wasn’t seen as a useful platform for celebrities as monetisation was incredibly difficult — she says of popular TikTokers from this time, “They were literally live streaming for hours just so they could use that live streaming money to maybe get a snack, maybe go to McDonald’s.”
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Social media platforms and the cultures and communities they serve as home to are built by those using them for the love of the game — the users Sarah and Asher referred to — not by those who see the platform as, at worst, another marketing tool, and at best, as a way to connect with their fans.
The nature of Tiktok’s heavily customised algorithm means that your perception of who made the app what it is today will undoubtedly be influenced by whoever you see on your For You page. This begs the question: does Jason Derulo look at any page besides his own? If his videos are the only ones he’s seeing, it’s no wonder he thinks he made the app what it is today.