It was a wild year on TikTok, with a full whiplash of cultural trends, moments, and viral videos that’ll leave your head spinning.
The short-form video app beloved by Gen Z has become a major cultural force, catapulting creators like Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae towards celebrity status and helping songs like Doja Cat’s “Say So” become Billboard chart hits.
It’s also home to some of the best memes on the internet, oldgrannies from spamming photos of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s face to making jokes about how “two pretty best friends” don’t exist.
Creators used the Time Warp Scan feature, which freezes an image in place as a blue line crosses the screen. This has allowed creators to make optical illusions, imagine themselves as Tim Burton characters, prove how smoothly they could wink, or even pretend to be angels. The possibilities are endless, and the #timewarpscan hashtag has over 14.3 billion views to date.