TikTok is transforming the English language

Social media algorithms are shaping real-life language through memes

The evolution of the internet in the early 2000s supercharged the creation and spread of memetic content. Now, highly tuned algorithms on platforms like TikTok and YouTube influence the language, phrasing, and content of creators, which shapes how we use language in the real world.

How TikTok ate the internet

TikTok is now deeply integrated into American culture, thanks to the app’s powerful algorithm and focus on entertainment which have influenced popular trends and social media content consumption in the US. This immersive piece highlights TikTok’s role in helping shape everything from music to fashion and even politics in the US—while its connection to China has also drawn scrutiny and raised national security concerns.

TikTok explained: how the app became a global phenomenon

Since 2018, the short-form, video-sharing app TikTok has gone from launching in the US to becoming a habit-forming cultural force that’s signed up more than half of the country's population as users.

TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms of all time

Centered around user-generated short videos, the platform was created by the Chinese technology company ByteDance Ltd. With over 1.8 billion users, the app has become a global force.

TikTok is changing the building trades

Plumbers, welders, and general contractors are meeting their customers on TikTok. This article delves into the growing group of tradespeople documenting their work (and advertising their services) on the popular app. The profiled workers are convinced this is the new way to sustain a life in the trades.

TikTok can turn everyday users into stars

TikTok is such a cultural force, it’s now a platform for turning ordinary users into stars. This "Planet Money" podcast episode performs a deep dive into how Tai Verdes went from working a day job and dreaming of becoming a successful musician to using TikTok to gain a following.

Explore how the most commonly used words in the English language have changed from the 1950s to 2023.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew on its future

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew dives into how the trendsetting video app and cultural phenomenon works, from what distinguishes its algorithm and drives viral videos, to the challenges of content moderation and digital addiction in this wide-ranging conversation with the head of TED, Chris Anderson.

TikTok's algorithm has changed the way hits are made

Songs aimed at TikTok's algorithm—designed for viral dances or soundtracking common experiences—often find success on the Billboard charts. An early example was Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road," which used his memes and a country-trap beat from the Netherlands to rise to the top of the Billboard charts.

A timeline and visuals on TikTok's rapid growth

The app that would become TikTok is known as Douyin in China, and this article recounts its history, acquisition of rival Musical.ly, and rebranding ahead of its lightning growth. One visualization shows how quickly TikTok reached 1B users.

TikTok boasts nearly 1.8B monthly users

The app has surged in popularity recently, with usage surging during the COVID-19 pandemic. Those users have generated high revenues, too, with over $23B in 2024.

Why TikTok's algorithm is likely driven by what you linger on

While the inner workings of the engine driving the vast majority of the app's engagement remain a secret, it is understood to rely heavily on what content users spend the most time watching rather than swipe past. Experts believe the app can develop user profiles robust enough for its algorithm to consistently match engaging content to in as little as two hours.

Most memes now begin on TikTok

The website Know Your Meme looked at the data for 700 to 1,400 memes uploaded to the platform each year from 2010 to 2022. In 2010, a majority of memes began on YouTube (34%) or 4chan (28%), but by 2022 most were starting on TikTok.

X (Twitter) started as a way to share short updates via text

What began as a way to share 140-character updates quickly grew into a vital platform for activism, politics, and pop culture. Hashtags, trending topics, and retweets—now common across the internet—originated on the platform.

How to read the news on TikTok

There's plenty of news on TikTok, but that doesn't mean it's all reliable. This guide, written by a communication technology professor, breaks down the ways the app's algorithm delivers news. It also covers how users can determine whether or not a story is factual or misleading. Most strikingly, the professor warns readers that if they didn't search for a TikTok video, then "it probably found you."

Osamu Dazai's 'No Longer Human' found a new generation of readers, thanks to TikTok

The novel was published in 1948, a month after the writer's suicide, and went on to become a classic of Japanese literature. Decades later, an English translation gained popularity on TikTok, where younger readers praised the book for its handling of alienation. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

The TikTok sale went through in January 2026

The app's ownership is now majority American, though TikTok CEO Shou Chew, who is Chinese, remains on the board of directors. It's unclear what, if anything, has changed for American users, as the company has historically kept the specifics of its algorithm a secret.

Defining 2025's internet slang

The internet is a slang factory, and new terms regularly crop up. This list breaks down some of the newest terms to hit social media, including "aura farming" (the cultivation of charisma to attract others) and "clock it" (an encouragement to remember something important).

Explore Wikipedia, but TikTok-style

Wikipedia's vast trove of information can be a bit dull to navigate. This homemade website takes real Wikipedia pages and places them in a swipeable format similar to TikTok, so you can learn about very random things in a similar mode as the culture-shifting TikTok app. Check it out here.

In 2019, videos on TikTok convinced children they had Tourette syndrome

Right before the COVID-19 pandemic, an "outbreak" of Tourette syndrome was attributed to videos from a German TikToker who documented his life with the condition. The children experiencing the symptoms all had the same tics, which experts say was a case of mass sociogenic illness, also referred to as mass hysteria.

TikTok intentionally keeps users scrolling, something researchers have found makes it more addictive than other short-form video platforms.

Music today is often intended to circulate on social media

Artists are increasingly using TikTok and other short form video platforms as a space to promote their music. One scholar notes this emphasis, and connect it to Taylor Swift's early use of social media to promote her own work and brand.

TikTok's personalized algorithm activates the brain's reward system

A 2025 Washington Post study found that 75% of the TikTok users it studied nearly doubled their time spent on the app within a month. Experts in design and psychiatry say this is due to the app's interface and algorithm, which, after learning about the user's preferences, recommend videos more likely to activate that person's dopamine reward system than non-personalized suggestions.

Roughly 62% of US adults under 30 say they use TikTok

A Pew Research Center publication reports that most members of Gen Z use the app. That's significantly more than other age groups: 39% for those ages 30 to 49, 24% for those 50 to 64, and 10% for those 65 and older.

Consumers are buying more books now than they were 20 years ago, thanks to a 2020 boom and a popular literary corner on TikTok.

Why TikTok loves Rainer Maria Rilke

It seems like an odd fit: A social media app known for bite-sized videos and a long-dead Austrian poet. Despite the odds, Rilke, especially his famous "Letters to a Young Poet," has become an unexpected trend on TikTok, where influencers share his wisdom on creativity and self-discovery.

TikTok doesn't exist in China

TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance Ltd., yet only the platform’s sister app Douyin is available in China. That's because the Chinese government regularly censors Douyin—something ByteDance likely believes would degrade TikTok, its international app.

TikTok's 'sonic logo' imprints the app's identity across platforms

As the app's popular videos spread to other platforms like Instagram and Reddit, the company sought a way to alert viewers that the content originated on TikTok. They decided on the sonic logo that now acts as a bumper on all of its shared videos, to attract users.

Language is evolution's great mystery

What we call language is something more specific than communication. Language is about sharing what's in our minds: stories, opinions, questions, the past or future, imagined times or places, ideas. So what does language mean for humanity, and how did we come to have it? Watch this brief video to discover more.

The TikTok ban isn't just for TikTok

The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act makes it unlawful for any “foreign-adversary controlled” entity to distribute, maintain, or update any “website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application” within the US.

Why romantasy is so popular on social media

Much of romantasy's success is thanks to social media, especially TikTok, where posts tagged as #BookTok or #Romantasy often propel titles to mainstream popularity. This deep dive into the trend interviews fans and marketers to explain why the genre's steamy content does so well online.

A lot of high fantasy relies on constructed languages

In "Lord of the Rings," there's Elvish. In "Avatar," it's Na'vi. In "Game of Thrones," it's Dothraki. The languages draw readers into these fictional stories, imbuing the worlds with a sense of realism. Linguist John McWhorter argues these are real languages because they have grammatical rules and evolve over time.

Memes are 'ready-made language'

Internet memes—groups of texts with shared core content, medium, and stance—are what we, as creators and consumers, make of them. Through their seemingly innocuous and irreverent design, these "bite-sized" transmissions have become vehicles of misinformation, conspiracy, propaganda, activism, and subversive messaging.

Linguistics professors believe memes are a language

It's generally agreed upon that languages exhibit at least some of the following characteristics: compositionality, social transmission, arbitrariness of form and meaning, and accomplishment of linguistic functions like asking questions and expressing emotions, among other qualities. Memes fulfill these basic requirements, giving them linguistic legitimacy.

Less than half of TikTok's US users have posted a video

Like most platforms, content is driven by a small number of active users—in TikTok's case, 25% of accounts are responsible for an estimated 98% of content posted.

Understanding TikTok-owner ByteDance's business model

ByteDance has ridden TikTok's major success to become the world's most valuable startup. This deep dive showcases some of the company's smartest moves and tactics, and where it's headed next.

Billie Eilish and TikTok helped inspire a bossa nova resurgence

Eilish's 2021 song "Billie Bossa Nova" along with a handful of other younger artists, like Laufey and Beabadoobee, have inspired Gen Z's interest in the genre, with the music soundtracking tens of thousands of videos on TikTok.

Inside the life of a 13-year-old beauty influencer

Thirteen-year-old Evelyn started posting get-ready-with-me style videos the summer before she entered 7th grade. Pull back the curtain on how she rose to internet fame through cutting observations of her peers at school, and how platforms like TikTok have responded to those under 13 joining the creator economy.

TikTok isn't factored into a song's rank on the Billboard charts, but it can have an impact

Billboard ranks a song's chart position based on its radio airplay, its physical sales, and its streaming numbers (across Spotify and other platforms), but doesn't include user-generated content, meaning it doesn't include TikTok videos. Keith Caulfield, Billboard's managing director of charts and data operations, notes that TikTok still has an impact, though, because listeners will often stream the app's most popular songs on other platforms.

A creator economy timeline

Long before anyone memorized a TikTok dance, the creator economy began with regular people blogging about their personal lives. Eventually, it snowballed into the creator economy we know today. The Washington Post created an interactive timeline to help visualize how the creator economy got from point A to point B.

Orwell warned readers about how abuse of language can lead to dystopias

In his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language," Orwell argues that language is the primary tool of political control and is "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." The essay warns readers that how they use and consume language will dictate what they permit—or prohibit—in society.

Memes grew alongside the internet

Early memes featured static images with superimposed text, but grew animated with the advent of video-sharing sites like YouTube and GIF-friendly imageboards like 4chan.

Dawkins believes cultural memes have mutated into internet memes

The world's creations fall into two categories: those that look designed but whose appearance or function came about due to random mutation and natural selection, such as birds, and those whose designs and mutations are knowingly crafted, such as airplanes.

Meta has added video features to attract more young users to Facebook

Amid an aging userbase and competition from newer social networks like TikTok, Facebook has seen its perceived relevance and cool factor progressively decrease. The Local tab and dating features are among several efforts to counter this perception.

Transformer architecture can recognize and predict patterns in language

The underlying software powering text generation in AI tools associates each word or subword—called a token—with a set of values corresponding to how often it appears near other tokens. By recognizing these associations in prompts, the LLM can infer meaning.

Childhood memes like '67' existed before the internet

Kids saying "67" and then erupting in laughter may have been popularized by social media, but childhood rhymes, songs, and jokes that confuse adults have always existed. Iona and Peter Opie studied the phenomena, publishing numerous books on the topic from the 1950s through the 1980s.

Dinosaur names have shifted from ancient languages to pop culture references

Early dinosaur names used Greek and Latin roots, often just attaching “-saurus” (lizard) to another word describing a notable trait. Over time, this convention has evolved to incorporate the names of where the discovery was made, local languages, and even celebrities.

The tongue evolved in animals roughly 350 million years ago

Creatures like fish rely on suction to consume food, flexing their gills to create water currents that vacuum up their meals. The evolution of the tongue enabled vertebrates to completely cut ties with the sea, moving onto land where they could sample new foods and ways to eat them.

The internet has changed the definition of a cult classic

Cult classics were often established slowly over time, often through alternative outlets, like independent video and record stores, underground magazines, and tape trading. The internet has put those delivery methods on hyperdrive, helping to splinter the notion of a mainstream monoculture. The Ringer's Miles Surrey wonders whether anything can have a "cult following" if everything now exists outside the "mainstream."

The history of curse words

While profane language is frowned upon in many circumstances, it remains an important part of human expression. This article explores the history of taboo words, and how they eventually creeped more into the mainstream. From 19th century Irish folk-saying “bejabbers,” to the dirty language in comedy routines by Lenny Bruce and George Carlin, discover a brief history of the swear words that have now become more prevalent in society.