“I did not want it interrupted with a bunch of advice about how to get ahead in the business world.” She doesn’t remember how long it took for her feed to go back to normal, she said, but it required active work. “I go to TikTok as a reprieve for fun and often dumb content or my much-needed Harry Styles and cat content,” she told me.
#DIRTY TICTOC FULL#
But she had a problem in January after she used TikTok to look for some quick job-interview tips-from then on, her feed was full of #girlbosses. A woman on Twitter who did not return my request for an interview wondered how she’d gotten stuck in “incest” TikTok.Īmy Rooker, a communications specialist from Michigan, downloaded TikTok at the beginning of the pandemic, and was surprised at how quickly it “perfectly pinpointed” who she was as a person. A co-worker who did not want to be named told me that the algorithm had mistakenly thought, for some time, that he was “all in” on “horny for Hagrid” memes. For the most part, though, we suffer from our feed alone, just as we scroll alone. Once the issue was resolved, their feeds went back to normal, and at least that was a communal experience. “Every video I see now has over a million likes and they’re genuinely so boring,” one person complained on Reddit. People who had spent months or years cultivating the algorithm’s understanding of them as alt, specific, and cool now found themselves presented with content that was merely popular. The horror of a ruined TikTok feed struck a bunch of users in March, thanks to a momentary glitch that made For You feeds surface only videos with high view counts. So I ask-though I do not want to-what does my TikTok algorithm say about me? (And can it please say something else?) TikTok users often refer to the process that produces the feed in front of them as “ my” algorithm, as if it really were an extension of self. This is disturbing because the recommendation algorithm that TikTok uses to pull videos for the personalized “For You” feed is known for being scarily precise, to the point where intelligent people have expressed concern that it might be used for mind control.
An art tutorial demonstrating how to paint a picture of your “A$$” as a surprise for your “man.” An Instagrammable rooftop. A woman taking a teeth-whitening device out of her mouth and letting drool run down her chin. Then a drinking game involving White Claw. An “age reveal” came after, from a woman who looked like she was in her 20s but was actually 43. One morning last week, the app recommended a video of a girl in a red dress saying slowly, “I’m officially at the age where I can date you … or your dad.” In the next video, a “doctor” tried to sell me some kind of coffee-based weight-loss drink. I can tell because its recommendation algorithm keeps providing me with videos that only a horrible person would like. Something is wrong with me, and TikTok knows it.
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