How much agency do users have over their TikTok feeds?
TikTok’s “Not interested” button effectiveness can be short-lived, Northeastern researchers have uncovered.
Just like snowflakes, no two TikTok For You pages look alike. And that is intentional. The social media site’s highly personalized — and blackbox-like — recommendation algorithm has long been considered its “secret sauce,” after all.
But how much control do the platform’s billion-plus daily users have over the topics that show up on their feed?
The social media platform says on its website the “Not Interested” button, which can be brought up after long pressing on a post, is one way users can let the algorithm know that they no longer want to see specific content.
But New Northeastern research reveals users may need to continually click on that button because video topics they specified as “not interested in” may begin popping up again within minutes after stopping.
The findings suggest that the feature doesn’t always work as advertised and users are ultimately at the mercy of the company about what shows up on their TikTok feeds, explained Piotr Sapiezynski, a Northeastern University professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and one of the co-authors of the report.
For the study, the researchers were interested in investigating claims from some users that TikTok’s “Not Interested” button didn’t remember their preferences, explained Levi Kaplan, a doctoral student and one of the authors of the report.
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“That’s an empirical question and something that we can measure,” he said.To test the theory, the researchers performed a third-party sock puppet audit on TikTok’s mobile app. That research method uses a bot software to create online user accounts for testing and analytics purposes.
They conducted the audit in three phases.
First, they created new TikTok accounts and, using emulation software, had each watch more than 200 videos related to a specific topic via search and their For You page. One looked at cooking videos, another looked at fitness videos, and another looked at sports betting videos.
The cooking videos served as the researchers’ baseline, since that type of content is relatively benign and unproblematic, according to Kaplan. Fitness videos, on the other hand, can be quite triggering to users, particularly for those with mental health or body image concerns. Similarly, sports betting is a hot-button topic. Gambling content is allowed on TikTok’s platform but is more closely regulated. In fact, the company has a whole separate guidelines page on the topic on its website, Kaplan highlighted.
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From there, the researchers created duplicate versions of those accounts to have the same watch history and split them into two groups. One group was instructed to watch additional videos and mark each as “not interested.” The other group was instructed to swipe up on the videos instead.
And finally, to test the effectiveness of the “Not Interested” button in the long term, the researchers created new clones of the Phase 2 accounts and put them into two groups. One group continued to mark the videos as “not interested,” and another group simply watched the videos instead.
The researchers conducted these phases multiple times for each topic category to ensure they observed consistent patterns.
In three out of the five tests the researchers conducted on both cooking and fitness content as part of Phase 2, they found that marking a video as “Not Interested” was more effective than swiping in reducing the total number of those videos appearing in a feed.
For sports betting, that was the case in four out of the five runs, Kaplan said.
But the long-term effectiveness of the “Not Interested” feature varied significantly from topic to topic once the accounts stopped marking videos.
In all five experimental runs for cooking-related videos in Phase 3, for example, videos began popping up within a few minutes, researchers found. By contrast, for sports betting, content started appearing only in two out of the five experimental runs.
“Generally, the ‘Not Interested’ button is better than just swiping past content, and users should use it, but if they find that their feed is still dominated by content [they don’t like], our research shows that this is something that can happen,” said Kaplan.
The researchers said the call to action is for TikTok to improve the reliability of the feature to ensure it works consistently, regardless of the topic. Northeastern Global News reached out to TikTok for comment, but has not heard back as of publication time.
Sapiezynski said he is hopeful that the result of the study will be useful for policymakers and regulators to investigate whether TikTok may be violating any consumer laws in the European Union.
“If you offer a button that says it’s going to do something, then you have to do it, otherwise it’s a dark pattern and that’s a violation of the [E.U]’s Digital Services Act,” he said.
