This drama is getting tiresome. It’s just an app, and many Americans—at least those who are old enough to vote—don’t actually care that much about it. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that TikTok’s popularity was second only to YouTube among teenagers, but it’s far from the country’s most popular social-media app overall, despite its salience as a conversational stand-in for “internet culture” or “annoying thing that young people like.” “It’s a lot of fanfare and suspense over an app that, well, just isn’t all that important,” Kate Lindsay wrote in The Atlantic in January, pointing out that only a third of U.S. adults interviewed for another Pew survey said they’d ever used it. (More of these people say they use Pinterest!) Among young adults, she added, Snapchat and Instagram are more popular.
“it’s just a game” is a common phrase used to justify cheating, and insult people who call it out. I’m pointing to the usage of “it’s just an app” here as similar to that, meaning it’s used to downplay how much actual impact an app can have, and to insult those who call it out, by making it out to be a lesser thing than it actually is.
Interesting.