TikTok employees use secret ‘heating’ button to make anyone go viral

The well-known TikTok For You Page only shows content selected by an algorithm based on your individual preferences, as the name implies. It has been discovered that not everything you see there is actually based on your individual behavior, though.

Surprisingly, six current and former TikTok employees and the company's parent, ByteDance, claim in a Forbes article that some of the content you see on the For You page was actually chosen by TikTok itself rather than according to your unique algorithm.

“The heating feature refers to boosting videos into the For You feed through operation intervention to achieve a certain number of video views,” explained one of the internal documents obtained by Forbes, which is called MINT Heating Playbook.

Still, the document states that “the total video views of heated videos account for a large portion of the daily total video views, around 1-2%, which can have a significant impact on overall core metrics.”

It appears that some employees are taking advantage of the heating button to boost their own accounts or those of their friends and family.

It has been claimed that TikTok itself is abusing the button by using it on brands and influencers it wants to partner with.

Both TikTok and ByteDance made an effort to defend themselves by claiming that only a select few people have access to the aforementioned special button and that they only use it to increase platform diversity.

Via Forbes