TikTok Algorithms and Mental Health

Introduction

The social media app TikTok has taken over the internet in the past few years and its algorithm is part of the reason why. The short videos that seem to be tailored to each user's individual personalities makes the app addictive. Many people believe that TikTok can be a source of happiness, however their algorithm can actually be detrimental to many users' mental health.

History

It began in 2016 as an app called “Douyin” by a company called ByteDance in China and was then internationalized as a different app by the name of TikTok. With it first launching internationally in September of 2017, TikTok quickly rose to the top of the charts by late January of 2018. In August of 2018, TikTok merged with an extremely popular app at the time called Musical.ly. Musical.ly was a startup whose social media platform was used to create lip-sync and comedy videos. As the app gained popularity, large celebrities, such as Justin Bieber, also began to use the app which increased downloads even more. In 2021, it had reached 1 billion users and earned over $4 billion in revenue. The app allows users to make short videos, anywhere from 15 seconds to 3 minutes, and can lip-sync to their favorite songs, use comedic sounds, or just make whatever they please as long as it stays within TikTok’s guidelines. The “For You” page is where users can discover new videos based on previous activity on the app which is dependent on TikTok’s own algorithm. Additionally, users can react to the content they see by liking, commenting, and sharing the posts which is said to increase the accuracy of their feed. Other features include live streaming, stories that last for only a day, a feature called ‘TikTok Now’ which resembles the app BeReal, and a following page where users can view only content of those that they follow. Many companies and brands also use TikTok as a way to promote their company via paid promotional videos.

The Algorithm

ByteDance has specified the four main goals of TikTok algorithm to be “user value”, “long-term user value”, “creator value”, and “platform value”. To achieve their goal of adding active users on a day to day basis, the company strives to optimize two metrics in the videos that it suggests, those being “retention” and “time spent”. The Wall Street Journal did their own study on the app’s algorithm and discovered that not only does the app track the users interactions with other posts, such as their likes, comments, and shares, but they also track how long a user spends on each video and uses those statistics to give the user more videos that will keep them on the app and keep them scrolling as long as possible. A document produced by TikTok’s engineering team in Beijing “TikTok Algo 101” gives more detail about their algorithm and was created to describe the algorithm to their nontechnical employees. In this document they give us an equation that is roughly used to calculate how a video is scored:

Plike X Vlike + Pcomment X Vcomment + Eplaytime X Vplaytime + Pplay X Vplay

Based on this equation, the videos with the highest scores for each user will be suggested on their “For You” page.

Effects On Mental Health

Isolation

Tiktok really exploded at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic when the world was under quarantine.