TikTok on the clock
One of the most interesting — and most confronting — features on my smartphone is the one that allows me to see how many minutes I spend per day on which app. That I spend an average of 5 hours daily on my smartphone does not surprise anyone who has ever met me because the device sticks to my hand.
One of the apps I open daily is TikTok, the platform on which millions of short videos are posted every hour. There are so many it’s impossible to watch them all. Fortunately, TikTok helps me by automatically selecting the videos that are really something for me. Super convenient.
On the platform, I see three different types of posts passing by in my feed:
- Popular posts that were often liked by millions of people
- TikToks that have just been posted and have only been viewed by a handful of people, often made by people from Belgium or the Netherlands
- Posts that the algorithm thinks fit me
TikTok can do the latter because it knows a lot about the videos in question and me. Which videos have I watched multiple times, and which have I swiped away after a second? What’s on the video that TikTok wants to show me? What videos do people watch that are a good match for me? What smartphone am I using? What time is it? Where am I? These are all pieces of data that TikTok uses to algorithmically…
