TikTok has manipulated its own algorithm to promote certain tentpole moments such as the World Cup or when Taylor Swift first joined the platform, a company cybersecurity exec said on Saturday, speaking at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas.
"We do promote content like the World Cup or when Taylor Swift joined, and at times boost it beyond the rating it would have ordinarily received from the recommendation system, much like Netflix promotes a featured video or movie on the homepage," Jeff Louisma, head of cyber and data defense for TikTok's US Data Security division, told SXSW attendees.
"This boosting applies to a very small percentage of videos and is subject to our business rules that are transparent inside the company," he continued.
He said boosting is controlled by the company's Los Angeles-based editorial team and can be reviewed by its data-management partner Oracle to "ensure that no one has introduced any unexpected rules or behavior into the system."
In January, Forbes reported that staff at TikTok and ByteDance could select specific videos to get wider distribution on the app, a practice referred to internally as "heating." Sources told Forbes that there were instances in which employees had used the feature improperly to promote their own videos or spouses' accounts, violating company policy.
"Only a few people, based in the US, have the ability to approve content for promotion in the US, and that content makes up approximately .002% of videos in For You feeds," a TikTok spokesperson told Forbes.
TikTok staff also have other mechanisms that can influence the type of content that's surfaced to users on its app. The company's US music-operations lead told Insider in August 2020 that the music team uses "promo levers" such as playlists, recommendations on its "Sounds" page, and keywords to optimize song discoverability in the app's search interface.
TikTok's algorithm has been under close scrutiny from security experts and politicians in recent months as they consider whether the app could be used to push content that's favorable to China, where TikTok's parent company ByteDance is headquartered.
Propaganda campaigns on social media tend to be more subtle than surfacing pro-Chinese military videos to users, Milton Mueller, program director of the Masters of Science in Cybersecurity Policy program at the Georgia Institute of Technology and coauthor of an Internet Governance Project report on TikTok and national security, told Insider in January.
"It could be as simple as blocking a certain user, or amplifying an influencer who's very pro a certain politician that the Chinese government would view as favorable for their interests," he said.
