TikTok, Boom. unravels the political chicanery behind the world’s most popular app

polygon.com:

The Polygon team is reporting in from the all-virtual grounds of the 2022 Sundance International Film Festival, with a look at the next wave of upcoming independent releases in sci-fi, horror, and documentary film.

In the early going of the new documentary TikTok, Boom., director Shalini Kantayya seems to be setting herself up for a hand-holding walkthrough for the olds who are at best marginally aware that kids are into some new social app. 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. The doc addresses widespread ideas and experiences around the app, mostly with a helpful journalistic remove that avoids either scolding or gushing. As a primer, it’s effective and absorbing.

Kantayya spends a little time laying out where TikTok came from, how it was developed in China under the name Douyin,