I was always taught that trust is the foundation of a good relationship. The glue. The essential factor. Once it’s gone, it’s over. I’ve found that a pretty simple principle to follow, personally. But then, I’ve never had a 100-billion-dollar investment in any of my relationships. That probably makes things being ‘over’ a bit more complicated.
Gen Z is TikTok’s most important audience. It has been ever since Musical.ly emerged in 2014, and it still represents roughly 60% of TikTok’s users today. Without a doubt, the group constitutes its most important relationship. So, I can only imagine how worrying it’s been for TikTok since the new Harris Poll report reported 60% of Gen Z no longer consider the platform to be trustworthy in 2026.
Sounds like someone’s getting dumped.
Where has this come from?
If you’re an active TikTok user, you’ll probably remember a strange time toward the end of 2024 when everyone bid farewell to the Americans. Trump had given ByteDance, the platform’s owners, a mandatory nine-month term to sell, and the deadline was rapidly encroaching. In your feed back then, you could see a mix of user-created black-and-white highlight reels – strange internet eulogies for the creators they’d lose – desperate pleas to the US government, VPN tutorials to bypass the ban, and general bedlam.
Then, amidst all the chaos, in January 2025, it happened. The lights went out.
For a bit.
12 hours later they came back on. Trump extended the deadline. Hooray! The platform was saved, and everything could go back to how it was before, back when everything was great, right? Well, no, sadly. Something was different. Things never went back to how they were before, and users noticed. Once they had their platform back, they realised that it wasn’t actually TikTok they were fighting to protect – that they were so scared to lose. That TikTok had already gone, years ago. The good old days were over.
When were the good old days of TikTok?
Communities love to mythologise. So much so, that we often can’t tell the difference between our invented fantasies and our actual history. The United Kingdom, for example, has long expressed an obsession with making assertions about King Arthur (stay with me, reader) and his heritage, despite almost all historians and archaeologists unanimously agreeing that he did not exist. Still, medieval and contemporary groups alike have used him as an example of the once ‘Great Britain’, a supposedly idyllic time before the Anglo Saxons, the Vikings and the Normans took over. The good old days. A time which, in fact, did not exist.
TikTok circa 2020 is generally considered by users of the platform to be the good old days. Granted, it’s more a concept than a post-Roman Britain where we were flourishing rather than dying of dysentery, but the sweeping romanticisation is the same. Users express an actual urge to return to this era, not just to view it. It is as though users wish to escape the platform as it is now. Which is exactly what’s being reported. 79% of Gen Z TikTok users say they miss the early days of the platform, according to the Harris Poll report.
Right now, users are expressing a specific nostalgia for what they call ‘lockdown TikTok’. A time which, for much of the predominate TikTok demographic, was defined by ‘cosy’ hours spent at home with little responsibilities, little requirements and a globally shared focus. Now, six years later, that demographic is largely grown up, likely now with numerous responsibilities and requirements, living in a world defined by ongoing war, growing political division and irreconcilable focuses. It’s not hard to see how a longing to go back to this ‘cosier’ time has emerged.
And you really can’t underestimate the power of that desire. This nostalgia is already having a substantial effect that translates to measurable losses. It isn’t only that 60% of Gen Z users trust TikTok less, but over 63% say that they’ve stopped buying things on the platform altogether. Most interestingly, consumers are specific about the motivations behind their discontent, too. Like all powerful nostalgia-driven movements, there is a faceless enemy in which they blame the erosion of their once-perfect time. In this case, it is a former companion – the omniscient TikTok overlord known as ‘the algorithm’.
When did everything go wrong?
Users are right to point fingers, though. The algorithm has changed and, in many ways, it has betrayed them. Compared with 2020, videos are now rewarded for being longer, which has created more space for larger-scale creators with the production value to captivate audiences for that amount of time. TikTok made this change to better reward its creators (increased watch time means increased time for ads) and prevent them from migrating to competitor sites such as YouTube. But the fallback for users has been a loss of naturality, overpromotion of larger brands, and great incursions of AI slop hoping to capitalise on the newly profitable watch times.
Similarly, thanks to the pressures of both Biden’s and Trump’s governments (no doubt acutely aware that North America makes up TikTok’s largest geographical demographic), there have been considerable restrictions put into place on the kind of content that TikTok can promote. The measurable effect of these changes has been that 33% of users now report the algorithm to not be as personalised or relevant as it once was.
As a recent Fortune article said, “TikTok’s original algorithm was a fluke of genius – a system so good at surfacing obscure creators that it felt almost democratic. But democracy doesn’t scale well into a $300 billion advertising ecosystem.” TikTok’s heyday, the time its users are now pining for, was a period in which the algorithm was fairer, and the system fresher.
So perhaps it isn’t just a case of Gen Z overromanticizing the past then. Maybe TikTok really has just got worse. If that is the case, what are its users likely to do? Go down with the ship? Launch a ‘Make TikTok Great Again’ campaign? Or, far more likely, are they going to follow their creators onto a familiar, time-worn ship – YouTube.
See ya, TikTok!
66% of Gen Z uses YouTube daily (one point higher than TikTok), and 44% plan to use it more next year. The platform provides better monetisation opportunities for creators and a more democratic promotional algorithm (arguably). Not only that, but YouTube now supplies an incredibly similar ‘feed’ to old-school TikTok following the development of its YouTube Shorts platform.
They’re not the only lifeboat waiting, though. Instagram, a subsidiary of Meta, has also done well to keep up in the short video platform market. It currently holds an equal share of the market to YouTube Shorts, roughly 20%. However, it does not achieve the same retention rate as its competitors, with roughly 65% compared to YouTube’s 73% and TikTok’s 78%, according SQ Magazine.
But TikTok still makes up the largest share of the global short video platform market, by far. In fact, its share is equivalent to that of YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels put together. This is despite all the former discontented stats, and further data that shows users reporting that it feels ‘more draining’ (43%) and more censored (53%) than it did the year before.
Needless to say, TikTok is still doing very well. Evaluations of the company put its worth at nearly 100 billion dollars, with a portion of that value credited to its original algorithm, the formula for which TikTok has kept tightly under wraps, with no competitors having successfully reverse engineered it or reproduced its success, as of yet.
Purchasing the company would, however, give other platforms access to that precious algorithm. The one lauded for its natural and democratic process. The algorithm that made organic, ironic and honest content the norm on social media for a considerable time. To possess that would allow any competitor, whether it be YouTube or Meta, to actually offer a return to the ‘good old days of TikTok’. And perhaps, most significantly, they could even mean it too.
