Enhancing Content Recommendations on TikTok

At TikTok, our aim is to empower users to create, connect, and engage on our platform. To achieve this, we provide creators and viewers with a wide range of features, tools, and resources, allowing them to have control over their experience. Today, we are introducing a new feature that enhances the context of recommended content in the For You feeds.

Discover the reasons behind content recommendations

TikTok's For You feeds offer users the opportunity to explore a diverse range of ideas, creators, products, and entertainment. Our recommendation system ranks videos based on various factors, including user activity on our app and preferences indicated by users. Our goal is to provide relevant and entertaining content. To help users understand why a specific video is recommended to them, we are introducing a new tool in the coming weeks. Here's how it works:

In your For You feed, tap on the share panel.
Then, tap the question mark icon labeled 'Why this video.'
You will be able to see the reasons why a particular video was recommended to you.

Our recommendation system utilizes advanced technical models. To make the technical details more accessible, we have broken down the reasons into the following categories:

User interactions, such as the content you watch, like, share, comment on, or search for.
Accounts you follow or suggested accounts for you.
Recently posted content in your region.
Popular content in your region.

This feature is just one of the ways we are working towards providing transparency to our users. We have already implemented guidelines for content categories that are not eligible for recommendation, tools to customize recommendations, and educational resources explaining how our content recommendations function. Moving forward, we will continue to expand this feature to offer more detailed and transparent content recommendations.