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So I finally installed tiktok. While registering, I indicated I was male. I was immediately shown what I can only describe as "anti-feminist" videos, women winning arguments against feminists, jordan peterson interview clips, etc. I generally scroll past these videos quickly, but they got more and more frequent, I probably made it worse for liking a few bill-burr clips early on, but it certainly started very early on.
My wife is a frequent tiktok user, she likes videos you'd expect of women, crafting stuff, recipes, etc. She gets also gets ton of overtly political feminist videos. Neither of us have strong feelings towards feminism. If anything, she's to my right on the gender issues.
I hear a lot of anti-tiktok rhetoric along the lines that china is invading our privacy. I'm much more concerned about tiktok dividing the younger generations and pitting groups against each other. This is probably more algorithmic than intentional, but this effect is almost certainly worse than the privacy concerns. I know this isn't anything new, other social media apps have similar effects, but I think the effect is much stronger with tiktok. With facebook, you inherit the political environment of your friends. With reddit and twitter you can choose your own echo-chambers. With tiktok, the decision is made against your will and almost instantly.
These algorithms are mysterious.
Geographical location is a factor. Most of the videos I get in TikTok and Instagram Reel are the majority of whatever cluster of videos I liked in a previous slice of time, with some random videos local to my area scattered in.
Also, for a deeper look at how these things work. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison, But if you have Spotify, you can download some of your metadata. They have a dizzying amount of what I'd suppose are advertisement categories. I was categorized as anything from "Midwest Truck Driver" to "Hot sauce enthusiast" (the former is way off, but the latter is somewhat correct, I mean, I like hot sauce but am not sure If I'm an enthusiast) and a whole host of other things that makes 0 fucking sense. There were soo many categories!
I would assume TikTok et al. use similar clustering techniques of users for their content recommendation as Spotify does for targeted advertising. WAG though.
As for "training" the algorithm, the longer you use a platform, the better it gets. I have been using my YouTube account for over a decade, and the recommendations are more or less precisely what I would have wanted to watch.
It's a significant one. My wife has been served the inane thottery published by our teenage next-door neighbors. There's no reason for a woman into golden retrievers and 'mom life' videos to be also interested in thirst traps besides location.
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