This looks like Mark Zuckerberg's secret TikTok account, which follows celebrities and famous internet creators
- Mark Zuckerberg quietly created a TikTok account, BuzzFeed's Ryan Mac first reported.
- The account is not verified but uses the handle "@finkd", which is the same as Zuckerberg's handle on Twitter. It's also tied to his verified Instagram account.
- Zuckerberg only follows 61 people on TikTok and doesn't seem to have posted anything. He follows celebrities like Ariana Grande and Selena Gomez, but mostly he follows TikTok superstars like Loren Gray and Jacob Sartorius.
- TikTok has become a formidable rival to Facebook, and is hugely popular with Generation Z - a demographic which has been abandoning Facebook.
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Mark Zuckerberg appears to be keeping a watchful eye on growing teen sensation TikTok, so much so that he quietly created his own account.
A BuzzFeed report published Wednesday revealed that in 2016 Facebook entered talks to acquire Musical.ly, the lip-syncing app from which TikTok eventually sprang. The talks didn't come to fruition and in 2017 Musical.ly was bought by Chinese tech giant ByteDance and merged with its existing short-form video app Douyin to form TikTok.
BuzzFeed also found what appears to be Zuckerberg's personal TikTok account with the handle "@finkd."
The account is not verified on TikTok, but it does link out to Zuckerberg's Instagram account. Zuckerberg also uses the @finkd handle on his inactive Twitter account.
Facebook was not immediately able to comment when contacted by Business Insider.
It seems Zuckerberg is something of a TikTok ghost. The account has a modest 4,055 followers and zero activity, with no posted videos or likes.
Zuckerberg follows celebrities like Jason Derulo and Ariana Grande
Zuckerberg only follows 61 people and all but three have blue ticks, marking them as verified or "popular creator" accounts.
They break down to a mix of major celebrities, official accounts, and TikTok teen personalities (which make up the majority).
Here is a quick crunch of the kind of TikTok accounts Zuckerberg follows:
- Famous musicians Jason Derulo, Bruno Mars, Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, Olly Murs (269,000 followers), and Gwen Stefani.
- Basketball legend Shaquille O'Neal.
- TikTok superstars such as Loren Gray (34.9 million followers), Baby Ariel (29.9 million followers), Jacob Sartorius (21.million followers), Lucas and Marcus Dobre (18.1 million), Danielle Cohn (14.5 million followers).
- Jiffpom, a Pomeranian dog with 19.5 million followers.
- Three accounts with no ticks: "Fashion Videos" (7 million followers), a podcaster called Russ Turner (193,000 followers), an account that appears to belong to a teenage girl (406,000 followers).
TikTok has become a major threat to Facebook, becoming a favorite with Generation Z as Facebook's user base ages and its engagement drops.
Zuckerberg has spoken before about the competition Facebook faces from TikTok, saying in leaked audio that the company's strategy for dealing with the social media heir-apparent is to focus on new markets where TikTok hasn't got a foothold.