The stolen TikTok Algo 101 document exposed the secret of the famed video sharing platform’s algorithm, which keeps its users glued to their screens watching clips from the app as time passes.
Secret TikTok Algorithm
According to a Gizmodo story, lawmakers and regulators have been intrigued by the secret behind the algorithm of the social media companies taking over the idle time of its user base.
It is worth noting that the Chinese video-sharing software TikTok has gotten a lot of attention as it quickly became one of the most popular social media platforms amid its larger competitors like Google’s YouTube and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram.
Indeed, TikTok has already surpassed YouTube as the social media site with the highest average watch time per user, at least in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Nonetheless, while making news from time to time due to its growing global user base and popular videos, there are many aspects of TikTok that most of us are unaware of.
One of them is how its algorithm works and how it successfully keeps us hooked on the brief chips TikTok shows us. Not to mention that it keeps its users returning to the app on a daily basis.
TikTok Algo 101 Document Leaked
TikTok’s secret algorithm has now been revealed to the world, thanks to a revelation by New York Times’ Ben Smith revealing an internal document from the Chinese social media app.
It should be noted, however, that the New York Times did not contain the aforementioned leaked paper, which purportedly goes by the name TikTok Algo 101.
Nonetheless, Gizmodo said in the same post that a TikTok spokesman verified to the news outlet that the document described by the Times is genuine.
According to a TikTok representative, the leaked document is intended to explain the tech giant’s algorithm to its staff who are not up to date on the latest technologies.
As a result, it is intended that the “TikTok Algo 101” document will describe the app’s algorithm in simpler terms. As a result, it may omit some of the more complex intricacies.
Nonetheless, it provides us with an official overview of how TikTok’s algorithm works.
The TikTok Algorithm: How Does It Work?
According to the leaked paper, TikTok does not only consider user view time in a video when recommending it.
Furthermore, TikTok’s algo examines the amount of likes that a video receives, the majority of comments from its users, the overall duration of a clip or the “playtime,” and finally, whether or not viewers watched the video.
The paper revealed a TikTok video’s algo formula as “Plike X Vlike + Pcomment X Vcomment + Eplaytime X Vplaytime + Pplay X Vplay.”
According to the leaked document, “the recommender system assigns scores to all movies based on this equation and returns to viewers the videos with the highest scores.”