In social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, you encounter videos that you do not usually follow, but that are viral in the country or globally. It is a known fact that the algorithm carefully selects these videos for you.
However, according to the news of Forbes today, TikTok secretly promotes even videos that the algorithm does not choose, even those that will not interest you, just to go viral. Moreover, there is serious evidence for this claim.
So how exactly is this “phenomena generation” done?
Making a statement to Forbes, 3 TikTok and 3 employees of its umbrella company ByteDance claimed that TikTok created its own phenomena, along with official company correspondence and documents. This process, called “heating”, means that TikTok and ByteDance employees intentionally manually highlight certain accounts and videos. The confessors, who also presented a document called “Heating Rule Book” to Forbes employees, stated that the videos were carefully adjusted to meet a certain viewing target and the videos were shown to almost all TikTok users.
Of course, similar manual highlighting is done on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but these companies only use this type of “heating” for global health organizations, administrative units, and similar important issues, and they openly state that they do. TikTok, on the other hand, uses this process to advertise brands, start viral trends and create their own phenomena, and hides all this from users.
3 former TikTok employees claim that employees using Heating at the company also highlight their own accounts, accounts of their spouses, family members, relatives and friends, in addition to the designated videos. He even states that some former employees who were fired from the company previously received money for Heating and that they did not hide these transactions from other employees, on the contrary, the employees encouraged each other.
Videos with heating cover 2% of all TikTok videos, but…
Confessional ex-employees state that videos with Heating cover only 1% to 2% of all TikTok videos, but these videos are of great importance in creating new trends and creating phenomena. In other words, only 1 hand featured video can reveal a brand new trend and change the vegetation of the entire platform, so to speak.
In addition, 3 former ByteDance employees who made confessions claim that TikTok’s parent company not only knew about this situation, but also announced this event under the name of “TikTik Heating Policy” to companies with which it partnered and made advertising agreements, but prevented the event from being heard by signing confidentiality agreements. In addition, Forbes employees state that all these claims are documented with official documents and internal correspondence, and that each document is examined one by one by Forbes officials.
Ex-employees also provided Forbes employees with copies of the company’s documents showing that only employees in China and the US state of Los Angeles can heat, as well as the handbooks and training materials prepared for them.
After these striking allegations, it is not known how the US government, which is already looking for an excuse to block TikTok, and the governments of other countries, especially the EU commission, which is concerned about the privacy and security of users, will take against TikTok. However, if the allegations are proven in court, TikTok could be permanently banned or its reputation severely damaged in almost all countries except China.
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