TikTok is a social media app on IOS and Android used for creating and sharing short video clips on lip singing, talent, and comedy videos. The app was formerly known as music.ly and changed to TikTok in 2017. The app has over one billion users. TikTok has many interesting features including, a “reaction” feature that allows the user to react to friends’ videos directly from the phone and creative tools like interactive gesture filters. The ‘for you page’ is what makes the app stand out from others. It serves a curation of personalized video recommendations that are based on viewing preferences. With permission, your videos that you create can be shared with other viewers not following you on the for you page, making it easy to go viral.

OHS has a few students that have gone viral. The most popular being Lincoln Maher, Aaron Bangs, and Fanta Omot. Omot being one of Magnet’s own. Omot has 16.7K followers, 852.4K likes and his most popular video has 5.4 million views on his account which is mostly comedy.

Junior Maher has 18.2K followers, 252.9K likes, and his most viewed video has 245.7K views. The video is a comedy video of him using someone else’s sound. He only spends about 10 minutes a day on the app. He spends half of his time on the app creating videos and half watching videos. Maher said, “My favorite part of the app is being able to get famous.”

Junior Jaci Stenzel is another TikToK user here at OHS. Stenzel claims she is on TikTok an average of four hours a day with most of that time being spent watching other user’s videos. “I like to make videos with captions. I like to make people think. I think really hard about the videos I make,” said Stenzel. Her favorite TikToker is TyBot. Stenzel had the app when it was music.ly, deleted it and then redownloaded it last spring as TikTok. Stenzel has 879 followers, 15.4K likes and her most view video has 541 views. Her most viewed video is a dancing video featuring, junior Jack Titchenal.

Titchenal spends around two hours a day on the app mostly watching others. Titchenal said, “watching everyone’s creative ideas is my favorite part of TikTok.” He has 505 followers, 3,722 likes and his most viewed video has 762 views. His most viewed video was a dancing video. Titchenal describes his videos as mostly dancing videos.

Senior Fahima Jama is another TikTok-user at OHS. Jama spends on average five hours a day on TikTok both watching and creating at that time. She makes mostly dancing and comedy videos but prefers to only post dancing videos and saves the comedy for her drafts. Jama has had the app for about a year, but only really started using it this past summer. Jama said, “ I like how it’s funny, creative and actually relatable.” Jama has never made it on the ‘for you page’ but says, “I should be. I deserve it.”

TikTok is gaining more and more popularity among OHS students here in Owatonna, as well as everywhere else. What used to be described as “corny” and “useless” is now entertaining many teenagers’ life.