TikTok announces a new tool that explains why videos appear on For You feeds

TikTok is adding a new feature that should give users more insight into why they are seeing a particular video on their For You feed. The new tool will explain, in understandable terms, why a specific content is being recommended to them.

TikTok announced the new tool in a blog post on Tuesday and said that it would roll out in the coming weeks. Once the feature is live, users can access it by pressing the share button and selecting the “Why this video?” option.

“This feature is one of many ways we're working to bring meaningful transparency to the people who use our platform, and builds on a number of steps we've taken towards that goal,” TikTok said. “Looking ahead, we'll continue to expand this feature to bring more granularity and transparency to content recommendations.”

Officially, TikTok has previously said that For You recommendations are primarily based on user interactions. So recommended content is affected by what users have watched, shared, and liked on the platform. It is also curated based on the pages they follow or suggested to them. These are the same categories of the reasons that will be provided in the upcoming TikTok tool.

The new feature will also inform TikTok users if a video is being recommended because of their location. TikTok will say if a video is appearing on their For You feed because it was recently posted or it is trending in the user’s region.

Back in 2020, the video-sharing platform shared a comprehensive post explaining how it is curating content for people’s For You feeds. Officially, TikTok said the main factors are user interactions, video information like captions and hashtags, and device/account settings.

However, the WSJ released a 13-minute video in 2021 summarizing its experiment conducted with algorithm expert Guillaume Chaslot. The investigations included more than a hundred automated accounts (a.k.a. bots), each programmed with different interests (not entered in account or profile settings).

One of its findings suggested that TikTok’s algorithm only needed one factor to curate content for the For You feed, and it is how long a user stays on a particular video. The WSJ reported that the app tracked “every second” the user spends hesitating or rewatching a particular video.

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