On a stormy night in October, a handful of Columbia University students met for the first time at the Sundial, the giant granite sphere that anchors the Manhattan campus. It was 11pm, cold and raining, but the group trekked here after being summoned by text messages and flyers pasted to dormitory doors and in the library. They were here to, in the words of one student at the meeting, “become TikTok famous”.
This was the inaugural meeting of Columbia University’s first club devoted to TikTok, the latest social-media app to capture the attention of teenagers. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-based tech company valued by SoftBank last year at $75bn — making it one of the world’s most valuable start-ups. It claims to have more than 1bn active users, which would make it more popular than Twitter and Snapchat combined, but trailing Facebook.
Many of those billion users are young people hoping to parlay the app’s burgeoning popularity into their own. Isaac Quiles is one of these people. At Columbia, he has set out to turn his hobby — filming silly videos in the hopes of going viral — into a campuswide organisation and charity fundraiser.