Second, TikTok has the most advanced algorithm system, especially in terms of participation, content, and types of interaction, which makes the addiction problem of TikTok more severe than the other popular social media ( Zhang X. First, TikTok is one of the fastest-growing apps and has surpassed previous social media in terms of user numbers and usage intensity ( Montag et al., 2021). Literature on social media addiction has focused disproportionately on Facebook, Instagram, and other mature social media platforms while ignoring concerns about TikTok’s penetration and related maladaptive behavior ( Smith and Short, 2022).Įxamining TikTok addiction behavior is important because of several reasons. The term, social media addiction, refers to the consistency of addiction-like symptoms or a lack of self-discipline regarding social media ( Casale et al., 2018 Klobas et al., 2018 Tarafdar et al., 2020). It brings lots of entertainment to people but is also becoming a new form of social media addiction ( Smith and Short, 2022).

TikTok enables users to capture memorable moments and create short-form videos to record their lives.

Led by TikTok (Douyin), the short video quickly captures the hearts of all age groups ( Du et al., 2020) and has also become the most popular social media platform among millennials in China ( Jung and Zhou, 2019). Due to its “short” nature (usually less than 60 s), the short video is very suitable for playing on mobile terminals and convenient for users to share on various social platforms. Originated in 2014, short videos have received favor in recent years. With the progress in information technology and the change in preferences of network users, new social media are popping up every day. Several theoretical insights from the stimulus–organism–response (S–O–R) model and the flow theory are used to explain the findings. Notably, this study finds that TikTok addiction is determined by users’ mental concentration on the medium and its content. We find that the system quality has a stronger influence than information quality in determining adolescents’ experience with TikTok and that the flow experience has significant direct and indirect effects on TikTok addiction behavior. To fill this gap, this study collects responses from 659 adolescents in China aged between 10 and 19 years old, and the data is then analyzed using Partial Least Square (PLS). While research on social media addiction is abundant, we know much less about how the TikTok information system environment affects users’ internal states of enjoyment, concentration, and time distortion (which scholars define as the flow experience), which in turn influences their addiction behavior. TikTok has one of the most advanced algorithm systems and is the most addictive as compared to other social media platforms.

Tiktok short