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| A secret feature in TikTok that lets employees pick which clips go viral |
The viral video promoted by TikTok's For You page may not be there simply because the app's algorithm knows what you mean. A new report from (Forbes) indicates that employees at TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, can manually select these clips to increase views.
Six current and former employees of TikTok and ByteDance told the site that employees can use a feature called "heating" to select viral clips.
The MINT Heating Playbook features guide as seen by Forbes reads: “The MINT Heating Playbook is to promote videos on your page ‘to you’ by stepping in to reach a certain number of video views. It could be a significant portion of your total daily video views, eg 1 % or 2%, significant impact on basic aggregate metrics.”
The site quoted its sources as saying that the feature is widely used to attract influencers and brands. Other than ads and promotional content, trending content is not labeled, which means it appears as a standard video without tags.
“We encourage select videos to enrich the content experience and introduce celebrities and emerging content creators to the TikTok community,” a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement to Insider. He added, "Only a minority of Americans can approve of the content being promoted in the US, and that content makes up about 0.002% of the videos in the For You broadcast."
The spokesperson said TikTok continues to expand the Why This Video feature to provide more accuracy and transparency around recommended content.
According to three sources and internal documents seen by Forbes, some employees abused the "gravity" feature by promoting their own accounts or people they knew. This is against company policy.
ByteDance, in particular, has come under increasing criticism for giving employees access to user data as the company faces pressure from US officials who fear the app is being used as a tool in the hands of the Chinese government.
In December, the company admitted that employees had accidentally accessed the data of TikTok users in the US, including some high-profile journalists.
The number of US states that have banned the use of TikTok due to security concerns is also increasing, currently there are about 27 states.