TikTok is a multi-genre video sharing social media app used by individuals of all ages across the world. The app has gained large traction among age groups like teenagers and young adults. The app was released in 2016 by ByteDance, a developer based in China. TikTok has become an outlet for people to express themselves in a wide variety of ways. Users release content on a daily basis, including videos of singing, dancing, comedy, lip syncing, and much more. Analysts are quite impressed by the popularity that this app has gained.
With this in mind, parents and government officials have become increasingly concerned with the privacy settings and data collection of the platform. Once downloaded, the app begins asking for access to location data, phone numbers, age, and other user information. The United States Government has pushed for legislation to limit the app’s usage and data collection. The U.S. was not the first to push to ban the app; according to Geoffrey A. Fowler, India has also taken steps to ban the app across the country (Fowler 2020). This has been a result of concerns that the Chinese Government is gathering data on TikTok users across the world, without their knowledge. Despite these concerns, TikTok continues to be one of the most popular and fastest growing social media platforms in the international tech industry today.
TikTok has mastered their ‘For You Page’ Algorithm throughout the years. According to Nathan Olsen, the current algorithm is based on three major components: “user interactions, video information, and device and account settings” (Olsen 2020). User interactions pertain to videos you interact with, accounts followed, comments, and content you create. Video information includes captions, hashtags, and audios within the video a user likes. Finally, device and account settings essentially include language preference, location settings, and device type. Device and account settings are used to optimize application performance, and serve as a backup in the algorithm as those aspects of user data are not actively measured, but rather collected. 
While data points like language preference, location settings, and device types play a more minor role in the TikTok FYP algorithm, this data is continually collected in order to ensure that users are being shown the most relevant content. Advertisers use this data to better target their marketing campaigns. For example, users within the same state or region may be shown the same or similar content in order to keep the app relatable to all of its users. Factors including TikTok sharing across other social media platforms come into play, as this also alters what users see on their FYP.
As previously mentioned, TikTok location data plays quite the role in the app’s recommendation system. Most recently, users have discovered that when placing two devices next to each other and scrolling through the app, both devices sync and display the same FYP. There are two main theories that have been speculated as possible explanations for this phenomenon. Some users have theorized that the TikTok FYP algorithm works this way in order to push connectivity. By displaying similar content to users in close proximity, the app creates a subconscious feeling of community between TikTok users. Another theory that has been conjectured is primarily based on TikTok’s location data and the A.I. system that determines what a user’s FYP may look like. While we know that TikTok’s FYP algorithm is partially dictated by a user’s location, this may have a much larger impact on the content shown through the app’s recommendation system than we previously thought. If two or more devices are in the same location, the app may register this into its A.I. and show the same content on those devices. With this in mind, TikTok’s data collection continues to be a large concern among users and officials.
Tik Tok's algorithim is a hot topic for debate online and the subject has over 5 million results on google alone. WIRED, a popular science science magazine, was one of the first major media outlets to break the big new that TikTok revealed how their "for you" page works. An article written by Louise Masakis states "In a blog post published on Thursday, the company outlined the basic mechanics of its For You page, revealing a recipe its users have long tried to estimate on their own. The social media company says it relies on a complex set of weighted signals to recommend videos, including everything from hashtags and songs to the kind of device a person is using," (Wired 2020).
