TikTok’s Latest Feature Offers New Insight Into How Its Algorithm Thinks

A new TikTok feature offers a rare bit of insight into how the social media giant’s often-opaque algorithm works, or at least organizes content–and could shape the way businesses market themselves on the platform going forward.

A slate of “Manage topics” sliders embedded in the app’s settings now allow users to manually adjust how often the app shows them videos from different categories, some of which include creative arts, dance, current affairs, and humor, The Verge first reported. The other categories on the list are fashion and beauty; food and drinks; health and fitness; lifestyle; nature; pets; sports; and travel.

The adjustment mechanisms all begin at a medium-range baseline that users can then move up or down.

TikTok tells Inc. that the feature is rolling out today, and information about it already appears on TikTok’s support page, where users are told they can access it under the “Content preferences” section of the “Settings and privacy” menu. (If you don’t see it in your app yet, check to see if it needs updating.)

Regardless, the curation tool offers some insight into how TikTok, one of the biggest social media platforms in the world, thinks about and organizes user-generated content. The app’s main video feed, the algorithmically curated “For You Page,” funnels users down an endless scroll of vertical videos posted by other accounts–but parent company ByteDance has stayed vague about the exact process by which the app chooses, sometimes with a shocking degree of accuracy, which videos a given user will enjoy seeing.

The presence of the category sliders tool could shape the way companies think about using TikTok for marketing. After all, the app is big business; $1.2 billion was spent on TikTok ads in the final quarter of 2023, according to one analysis. Now, savvy marketers may try to tailor their content to fit into particular buckets that they know the For You Page distinguishes among, or even focus their branding efforts on categories they anticipate users will manually ask to see more of. (Although the fact that TikTok considers topics like “dance” and “humor” to be relevant to the “For You Page” is likely not a shock to anyone.)

Pew polling from last summer indicated that 62 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 use TikTok. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube all ranked higher among that same age group, and TikTok use fell off sharply among older adults.

Complicating things for the company is the ongoing push to ban it from America over its ties to China, where ByteDance is based. Calls to ban the app, or force a sale to an American company, began under President Trump and continued during the Biden presidency, culminating earlier this year in the passage of a law requiring ByteDance to either divest TikTok’s American assets or leave the country entirely. A legal battle is now being waged over the law even as the clock ticks down toward the January sale deadline.