TikTok is undoubtedly one of the most prolific social media apps ever created. According to Statista, a German online platform that gathers and pictures data, Tiktok was the 5th most popular social network worldwide as of April 2024, with close to 1.6 billion monthly active users. Before TikTok, there was Musical.ly, a short-form video social media platform. In November 2017, the Chinese-owned company ByteDance acquired Musical.ly for $1 billion and merged it with Tiktok, according to AP News. After this acquisition, TikTok’s popularity skyrocketed.
Since then, TikTok has become a hub for sharing dances, music, comedy, and other forms of creativity. It has also become a place to share personal stories, information, and news. In October 2019, U.S. politicians began to flag TikTok and other Chinese-owned platforms for national security concerns, according to AP News. In December of 2019, the app was banned from the phones of U.S. military personnel. In 2020, President Trump ordered ByteDance to “divest” from TikTok’s U.S. operations.
When President Biden took office in 2021, he effectively halted the conversation surrounding TikTok by dropping President Trump’s ban. There was a lull in the push to remove TikTok from Americans’ phones, which allowed for additional platform growth. In 2022, TikTok became the most downloaded app in the world. According to an article published by Charle Agency, in October 2024, there was an astonishing 16% increase in users worldwide between 2022 and 2023.
According to the aforementioned article by Unchained Music, the United States makes up the second-largest market for TikTok with around 122 million users. The country trails Indonesia by around 6 million users. The app’s base is diverse compared to its competitors but favors a younger audience. Over 70% of TikTok’s users were under 34 years old in 2024, according to Unchained Music. The platform is particularly dominant among the teenage demographic, with 25% of its active users falling between the ages of 10 and 19. The site also reported teens as the most “dynamic demographic on TikTok”, spending a significant amount of time on the app compared to other groups and especially high engagement rates that fuel a personalized algorithm.
TikTok is widely used in the Malvern community among students in both the Upper School and Middle School. Mrs. Korin Folan, Head of Student Leadership at Malvern, shared her thoughts on the app.
“TikTok is designed–like most social media apps–to engage and keep your attention. They are changing our brains; that’s what they’re designed to do, and we’re allowing them to do it. I think for sure, when we talk about just that addiction, I think we have a lot of people who could probably qualify in that category, just based on social media,” Folan said. “I think it has impacted our students in a lot of different ways. There are [good] things…but these things are not designed for moderation. They’re designed to capture your attention as much as they can.”
Folan and other administrators at Malvern have been monitoring the effects that apps such as TikTok have on students’ ability to learn, focus, and interact with others.
“There’s still that distraction of a lot of those apps on phones,” Folan said. “[It’s] driven by a lot of research that is coming out now. The Anxious Generation was a book that the entire Cabinet Team read this summer together. We then did a book club with the faculty and staff in [the Fall] and now we are doing one with the parents in the Spring,” Folan said.
The effects of this distraction have been so significant that discussions are ongoing about the possibility of banning phones entirely in the Upper School during the next school year. The no-phones policy was already implemented years ago in Malvern’s middle school.
“The middle school has not had cell phones for the past two years. In the Upper School, we are doing the ban in the classroom this year, with the idea that we will eventually go to no phones. A lot of schools have moved that direction already,” Folan said. “We wanted to [ease] into it and gather some more data.”
Evan Cooper ‘25 received a phone when he was about 12 years old and currently only uses one social media app: Snapchat. He does not use TikTok or have it downloaded, but reports seeing his peers using the app frequently, along with similar apps like Instagram.
“I look around at a lunch table, and sometimes people just have their phones in their faces. [Usually] it’s Instagram Reels or TikTok,” Cooper said.
Cooper reported that he believes it is too much to be on TikTok more than an hour and a half each day. He said a nationwide ban of the platform may not make sense on a civics level, but it could have positive effects on his peers by decreasing the amount of internet content of low quality or value.
Cooper is an outlier in terms of Malvern students using social media. According to a cell phone and social media survey conducted on January 15, 2025 among Upper School students, almost a quarter of students reported using TikTok more than any other social media or gaming app. It was reportedly the second most-used app at the school, only trailing Instagram by about 7%. Though TikTok is the second-most used app at Malvern, about 25% fewer students had the app downloaded on their phones than apps like YouTube, and Snapchat, pointing to the high usage of TikTok among students who have the app downloaded.
Upper School Social Studies Teacher Mr. Hill has had a no-phone policy in his classroom for years now, well before it became an enforced Upper-School-wide norm. Hill saw the benefits of a phone-free learning environment relatively early. Although he acknowledges that phones can be beneficial for students to find answers to their questions quickly, he believes that it is more important to stimulate longer thought processes for students.
“What I started to notice was that while [technology] could answer questions [quickly], it short circuits our thinking process and our conversation process. How do we build knowledge together if every time somebody doesn’t know something, we just go to find the factual answer? We [miss] out on using our long-term memory recall,” Hill said.
The wide usage of the app is a concern for many leaders in education. Navigating a world increasingly dominated by social media and technology raises more serious concerns about how young people interact and learn.
“I don’t again blame anybody. I think we’re all navigating this together, but the data that’s out there now is pretty alarming.” Folan said.
Looking forward, students will need to be conscious of their social media use and how it affects their education.
