I do see risk with the algorithm being manipulated in the future, but right now it seems like I have the most personal control over the Tiktok feed than any other social media app.
If I click the not interested button, it stops sending me videos of content similar to that. Youtube, Facebook, Google News, and Twitter all seem to ignore me when I click their equivalent buttons. I have been attempting for years to get Google News to stop showing me Meghan Markle drama, and have blocked half of the news outlets in the UK.
The videos are attached to the sounds used in them.
Anyone can literally stick a totally false political statement or whatever they want over "OhNo" by Creeper and it's highly likely to trend. It's also why the song OhNo, and many variations of it played so often on the platform. There is always a limited and interchangeable pool of songs designated by the platforms to trend, in order to make the ruse less obvious. The designated sounds can also be muted so that uploaded video sound can only be heard as well, but plays of the original sound still get the royalties.
On the back-end of that, Creeper makes royalties from each stream, and gives a cut to sponsors and TikTok... Literally millions of dollars each day are generated by any associated video plays... The entire music industry is looted by this too.
This is the BS involved with the algorithm on TikTok, it's not mostly AI driven recommendations, it's driven by a pre-designated sounds that make a lot of money because of royalty plays. TikTok gains popularity and money each time these trending sounds play picks the songs that trend. Other musicians, thinking they have a chance (without being endorsed by the platform) struggle fruitlessly to get their sounds to trend, but undercover they can't because they are not aligned with the right brand partnerships that lobby TikTok and pay heavily for advertising.
It's primarily not the algorithm in charge based on my observations as a developer, and the idea of content "choice" on TikTok is mostly a fallacy, though taxonomy does play a minor role in the mix, user accounts also manipulate their taxonomy to insert their content regularly into your feed.
> The designated sounds can also be muted so that uploaded video sound can only be heard as well, but plays of the original sound still get the royalties.
I'm not sure I'm parsing this correctly: Is the implication here that TikTok is using popular music in a similar manner to a scrambler [1], allowing them to descramble and extract a "clean" version of whatever was recorded from the user's environment? If so, it's not clear to what purpose, and how that ties in to nefarious royalty games.
No, you make a video with your own audio but when preparing it for publish, you add a popular audio track and set its volume to zero. This means your video will be associated with the track and may show in more feeds or searches and royalties will still be paid even though no one heard the track.
This seems very much like a tangential side rant but I one hundred percent agree with you. I was even thinking of writing an extension to block any links and mentions of the royal family. I'm British and I can't stand the amount of media coverage they get.
If I click the not interested button, it stops sending me videos of content similar to that. Youtube, Facebook, Google News, and Twitter all seem to ignore me when I click their equivalent buttons. I have been attempting for years to get Google News to stop showing me Meghan Markle drama, and have blocked half of the news outlets in the UK.