An empirical investigation of personalization factors on TikTok

M Boeker, A Urman - Proceedings of the ACM web conference 2022, 2022 - dl.acm.org
M Boeker, A Urman
Proceedings of the ACM web conference 2022, 2022dl.acm.org
TikTok currently is the fastest growing social media platform with over 1 billion active
monthly users of which the majority is from generation Z. Arguably, its most important
success driver is its recommendation system. Despite the importance of TikTok's algorithm to
the platform's success and content distribution, little work has been done on the empirical
analysis of the algorithm. Our work lays the foundation to fill this research gap. Using a sock-
puppet audit methodology with a custom algorithm developed by us, we tested and …
TikTok currently is the fastest growing social media platform with over 1 billion active monthly users of which the majority is from generation Z. Arguably, its most important success driver is its recommendation system. Despite the importance of TikTok’s algorithm to the platform’s success and content distribution, little work has been done on the empirical analysis of the algorithm. Our work lays the foundation to fill this research gap. Using a sock-puppet audit methodology with a custom algorithm developed by us, we tested and analysed the effect of the language and location used to access TikTok, follow- and like-feature, as well as how the recommended content changes as a user watches certain posts longer than others. We provide evidence that all the tested factors influence the content recommended to TikTok users. Further, we identified that the follow-feature has the strongest influence, followed by the like-feature and video view rate. We also discuss the implications of our findings in the context of the formation of filter bubbles on TikTok and the proliferation of problematic content.
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