Difference between revisions of "TikTok Algorithms and Mental Health"

Revision as of 15:06, 27 January 2023

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, especially to users suffering from depression or an eating disorder.

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.³

Effects On Mental Health

Depression

In 2021, the Wall Street Journal did an investigation to dive deep into the TikTok algorithm. They programmed user bots who had a set of particular interests, however, those interests were never entered into the app. The bot would scan each video for hashtags or images that were related to the programmed interests, when one was found it would stop, watch, and rewatch these videos. One of the bots main interests were sadness and depression, and within three minutes of opening the app, the algorithm suggested a video about losing people in your life. The bot stopped and watched this video two times. As the bot continued to watch the tiktoks and stop in the ones that were related to depression and sadness, the algorithm is getting a sense of ‘who’ the bot is, what its interests are and what content it is interested in. However, instead of trying to steer the bot away from sad content and things that may worsen its depression, it continues to suggest these videos and after about 35 minutes of being on the app about 93% of the content becomes related to sadness and depression. This causes an issue as someone who may be depressed can easily become more depressed or have a hard time getting out of their depression due to the depressive content that they see on their TikTok feed.²

Additionally, the non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) published a report that said that it can take no more than three minutes after opening the app to be shown content that relates to suicide. Although, a Tiktok spokesperson has said that they are trying to create “safeguards” to prevent it from happening, until they completely mitigate this type of content, it will continue to harm the mental health of their users.⁴

Body Image

In the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) article mentioned previously, they also reported that the app’s algorithm also has suggested content promoting eating disorders to users within the first 10 minutes of signing up for an account.⁴ Social media in general is known to be related to higher body dissatisfaction due to edited bodies and “fitspo” also known as fitness inspiration. Approximately 25% of the users on TikTok are between the ages of 10-19 years old, making their demographic particularly younger than most other social media. With this younger demographic, users may be especially vulnerable to the effects of the content that they are seeing.⁵ In 2021, The academy for eating disorders (AED) recommended that along with being more transparent with their algorithms, social media companies should identify and remove videos and accounts that promote eating disorders.

Ethical Implications

The algorithm that TikTok has created has shown to have negative impacts on some of its users mental health which poses the question of if TikTok is prioritizing engagement and profit over the mental health and well being of its users.

References

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1. “TikTok.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 21 Jan. 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok.
2. “Inside TikTok's Algorithm: A WSJ Video Investigation.” The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones & Company, 21 July 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-algorithm-video-investigation-11626877477.
3. Smith, Ben. “How TikTok Reads Your Mind.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 6 Dec. 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/business/media/tiktok-algorithm.html.
4. “New Report: Deadly by Design.” Center for Countering Digital Hate | CCDH, CCDH, 22 Dec. 2022, https://counterhate.com/research/deadly-by-design/?amp.
5. Harriger, Jennifer A., et al. “The Dangers of the Rabbit Hole: Reflections on Social Media as a Portal into a Distorted World of Edited Bodies and Eating Disorder Risk and the Role of Algorithms.” Body Image, vol. 41, 2022, pp. 292–297., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2022.03.007.