On the second day of the Web Summit, Khartoon Weiss, responsible for Tiktok’s business solutions area, highlighted the platform’s profound impact on culture and the global economy. In conversation with Katie Drummond, editor at Wired, she explains how the digital platform has grown so much in the last five years.
“We would be nothing without our community, which has accompanied us from the beginning of the platform to where we are today”, said Weiss, to emphasize that the social network is more than that and that all of its success is due to its community of content creators. For the representative, the application is a place where these creators can become true entrepreneurs.
Khartoon Weiss assured Wired’s editing director that the platform’s focus is on users – in addition to being inspired, he said, “they are inspiring”. As an “ally” application for creators, he also said, TikTok seeks to support them with tools that help them better understand the public’s tastes and know how to use artificial intelligence to amplify creativity, not to replace it. This is the vision, he said, that seeks to be an answer to the desire of millions of young people who want to make content creation a career.
The person responsible for Tiktok recalled that there are emblematic movements that started on the platform and that impacted the “real world”. Among them, BookTok, which he described as innovative because in the last year it contributed to a 40% increase in book purchases worldwide. “We have seen people returning to books, and that is very important because we are an education and entertainment platform, and we are here to help people grow and learn”, he highlighted.
As responsible for the platform’s business solutions area, but also as a user, he highlighted the example of “recommendations”, people have created a community and are starting to discover different things through the app, something that therefore has an “impact in the real world”.
Weiss shared a personal story to illustrate this, remembering that she visited Lisbon with her husband during the Christmas season and, before the trip, used the app to look for local suggestions. He discovered a café where he had “the best breakfast ever” and a Lisbon artisan specializing in custom-made leather gloves. Intrigued by the viral videos about the small business, she went to the store. “I waited 45 minutes in line, in the cold, just for that man to put a glove on my hand” And it was worth it: “they are the best gloves I have ever had”.
Back in Lisbon, months later, he wanted to buy a pair to give to his mother. He went to the store again, but this time he found no queues, nor almost any gloves. When he asked the owner what had happened, he received a simple answer: “They sold out, TikTok.”
But the great power to influence brings great responsibility, he argued, which TikTok sees as synonymous with trust and security. The company guarantees “a very safe viewing environment and that all accessible content is very user-friendly”. The result “is a moderation accuracy rate of 99.2%”, he said. The platform has more than 50 automatic protections for younger users, he said, making sure that the application provides a safe environment to create: “When we have a safe environment, creativity can develop”, he concluded.
Finally, he assured that the future of the application is focused on discovering “and creating commerce and growth opportunities for the creator community”. Being more than an entertainment app, Khartoon Weiss wants the digital platform to be an ecosystem where creativity generates value and culture moves the world.
Text written by Margarida Nogueira and edited by Mafalda Ganhão