TikTok’s bread and butter are these kinds of automatic tools, and the platform has mostly resisted giving users fine-grained tools for controlling the content they see (or don’t see). Even the app’s layout reflects its priorities: while you can swipe to the Following feed, the For You page is where TikTok’s remarkable algorithm can simply tell you what you like. The more TikTok can be an app you open and swipe instead of one that assigns homework, the better.
That’s a difficult position to be in, especially as younger users adopt the app and problematic types of content gain popularity. This is something that every social app struggles with: understanding how users interact with and experience content, as well as how to measure success beyond views and likes. In reality, we still don’t know much about TikTok’s health effects.
