TikTok, Boom. review: A new doc explores the app’s censorship and privacy issues

Polygon’s team reports from the virtual grounds of 2022 Sundance International Film Festival. They will be reporting on the latest independent films in science-fiction, horror and documentary.

At the beginning of the new documentary TikTok, Boom.Shalini Kantayya, the director of TikTok seems to set herself up as a guide for older users who might not be aware that children are using social media apps. The setup is pure TikTok 101, walking the audience through some startling statistics about the app’s meteoric growth and its boasts of a billion active users, complete with a corny montage of news footage and stock footage. (Slow-mo footage of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg looking wide-eyed and nervous, backed by a voiceover quote about TikTok challenging the dominance of Silicon Valley, is a particularly cheesy touch.)

But over the course of this efficient rundown on the history, impact, and future of TikTok (which could easily be mistaken for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2021 directorial debut) Kantayya offers a condensed look at the corporate and political chicanery around the app, and delivers some insight into the ways its most successful users are turning it into a career. Once her doc gets going, it’s accessible enough for tech-agnostic people who still don’t own smartphones, but mines insight and intel that even the most habitual TikTok viewers and creators might find useful. This doc covers a wide range of ideas and experiences about the app. It is written with an informative journalistic tone that does not scold nor gushing. As a primer, it’s effective and absorbing.

Kantayya spent some time explaining where TikTok originated, its development in China, and how it was eventually released internationally in 2016. After absorbing American lip-synching apps Musical.ly. She avoids editorializing herself, but gets framing quotes from authors and journalists who talk intently about the app’s reach, design, and place in a crowded market competing for the attention of young people in particular.

But she gets more mileage out of her interviews with a few prominent YouTube creators who’ve gone viral in different areas and different ways, like beatboxer Spencer X, who parlayed his musical videos into a million-dollar career, or activist Deja Foxx, who went viral in 2017 at age 16 after confronting then-senator Jeff Flake over Planned Parenthood at a town-hall meeting. The app puts users’ opinions under intense scrutiny, which gives them an international audience that can be used to promote social and political causes as well as to collaborate with stars for projects.

Photo: Sundance Institute

There will always be cautionary tales. Kantayya however keeps them short and to the point. Foxx speaks out about bullying and harassment caused by public exposure. While Afghan-American teenager Feroza Aziz found a community and an escape from real-life racist bullying through sharing her culture and life on TikTok, her videos were censored and her account banned after she posted videos raising awareness of China’s genocidal repression of the Uyghur people.

For regular TikTok users, that’s where most of the value of TikTok, Boom. will come in — not in putting numbers on the popularity of the popular app they use, but in laying out exactly what they’re exposing themselves to in terms of data-mining, privacy concerns, and control over what they’re allowed to say. One interview reveals that Douyin has much more stringent limits, including censoring people with tattoos, piercings, or “unnatural hair colors,” while memos reveal how the parent company, ByteDance conspired to have its apps shadowban videos for a vast number of reasons, from featuring people of color to discussing queer issues to featuring overweight or disabled people — all supposedly in the name of protecting those people from bullying.

As Kantayya raises these issues, she never seems like she’s trying to push people off the app, or lecture them about its use. But the clear evidence that their cute dance videos and sight gags are being monitored for state sedition is startling, and so is the darker side of an algorithm designed to analyze and record everything about users’ personal tastes, and weaponize it to sell them products and keep them on the site for hours.

While the film focuses mainly on the TikTok story, Kantayya allows herself to use humor when discussing the politics surrounding TikTok. The film takes on a wryer tone when addressing a viral stunt that humiliated Donald Trump and seemingly sent him on the warpath against the app, while he simultaneously demanded a finder’s fee if his administration regulated the app in a way that forced it to sell its U.S. operations to Microsoft. And the story gets downright salty in looking at Zuckerberg’s clumsy attempts to control or destroy TikTok’s parent company on behalf of Facebook.

There aren’t really any new ideas in TikTok, Boom.There are no sudden revelations or blinding insight, nor any threats or warnings. The approach is often scattered and superficial, focusing only on a handful of quotes or news articles about a single topic. It’s more of a conversation piece rather than an in-depth dive into any particular issue. It’s a brisk, capable, entertaining act of synthesis, seemingly designed to get its viewers on the same level of understanding of TikTok, no matter what level they start at. It almost feels like a public service as much as a documentary — a way to catch up on the world’s most downloaded app, and to be a little more conscious of the inner workings behind the app’s endless diversions and distractions.

TikTok, Boom.Is currently looking for distribution.