Transparency Center

Report March 2025

Submitted

TikTok's mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. In a global community such as ours with millions of users it is natural for people to have different opinions, so we seek to operate on a shared set of facts and reality when it comes to topics that impact people’s safety. Ensuring a safe and authentic environment for our community is critical to achieving our goals - this includes making sure our users have a trustworthy experience on TikTok. As part of creating a trustworthy environment, transparency is essential to enable online communities and wider society to assess TikTok's approach to its regulatory obligations. TikTok is committed to providing insights into the actions we are taking as a signatory to the Code of Practice on Disinformation (the Code).

Our full executive summary is available as part of our report, which can be downloaded by following the link below.

Download PDF

Commitment 19

Relevant Signatories using recommender systems commit to make them transparent to the recipients regarding the main criteria and parameters used for prioritising or deprioritising information, and provide options to users about recommender systems, and make available information on those options.

We signed up to the following measures of this commitment

Measure 19.1 Measure 19.2

In line with this commitment, did you deploy new implementation measures (e.g. changes to your terms of service, new tools, new policies, etc)?

Yes

If yes, list these implementation measures here

At TikTok, we strive to bring more transparency to how we protect our platform. We continue to increase the reports we voluntarily publish, the depth of data we disclose, and the frequency with which we publish.
In December 2024, we published our newest collection of transparency reports, including our: Community Guidelines Enforcement Report (July-September 2024); Government Removal Requests Report; Law Enforcement Information Requests Report, IP Removal Requests Report; and most recent Covert Influence Operations Reports, where we shared information about the influence networks we disrupted in October and November 2024.
We also worked to make it easier for people to independently study our data and platform. For example through:
- our Research Tools which empower over 500 research teams to independently study our platform.
- the downloadable data file in the Community Guidelines Enforcement Report offering access to aggregated data, including removal data by policy category, for the 50 markets with the highest volumes of removed content.

Do you plan to put further implementation measures in place in the next 6 months to substantially improve the maturity of the implementation of this commitment?

If yes, which further implementation measures do you plan to put in place in the next 6 months?

Measure 19.1

Relevant Signatories will make available to their users, including through the Transparency Centre and in their terms and conditions, in a clear, accessible and easily comprehensible manner, information outlining the main parameters their recommender systems employ.

QRE 19.1.1

Relevant Signatories will provide details of the policies and measures put in place to implement the above-mentioned measures accessible to EU users, especially by publishing information outlining the main parameters their recommender systems employ in this regard. This information should also be included in the Transparency Centre.

The For You feed is the interface users first see when they open TikTok. It's central to the TikTok experience and where most of our users spend their time exploring the platform.

We make clear to users in our Terms of Service and CGs (and also provide more context in our Help Center article and Transparency Center page) that each account holder’s For You feed is based on a personalised recommendation system. The For You feed is curated to each user. Safety is built into our recommendations. As well as removing harmful misinformation content that violates our CGs, we take steps to avoid recommending certain categories of content that may not be appropriate for a broad audience including general conspiracy theories and unverified information related to an emergency or unfolding event. We may also make some of this content harder to find in search.

Main parameters. The system recommends content by ranking content based on a combination of factors including:

user interactions (e.g. content users like, share, comment on, and watch in full or skip, as well as accounts of followers that users follow back);
Content information (e.g. sounds, hashtags, number of views, and the country the content was published); and
User information (e.g. device settings, language preferences, location, time zone and day, and device types).

The main parameters help us make predictions on the content users are likely to be interested in. Different factors can play a larger or smaller role in what’s recommended, and the importance – or weighting – of a factor can change over time. For many users, the time spent watching a specific video is generally weighted more heavily than other factors. These predictions are also influenced by the interactions of other people on TikTok who appear to have similar interests. For example, if a user likes videos 1, 2, and 3 and a second user likes videos 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, the recommendation system may predict that the first user will also like videos 4 and 5.

Users can also access the “Why this video” feature, which allows them to see with any particular video that appears in their For You feed factors that influenced why it appeared in their feed. This feature provides added transparency in relation to how our ranking system works and empowers our users to better understand why a particular video has been recommended to them. The feature essentially explains to users how past interactions on the platform have impacted the video they have been recommended. For further information, see our newsroom post.

User preferences. Together with the safeguards we build into our platform by design, we also empower our users to customise their experience to their preferences and comfort.

These include a number of features to help shape the content they see. For example, in the For You feed:

Users can click on any video and select “not interested” to indicate that they do not want to see similar content.
Users are able to automatically filter out specific words or hashtags from the content recommended to them(see here).

Users are able to refresh their For You feed if they no longer feel like recommendations are relevant to them or are too similar. When the For You feed is refreshed, users view a number of new videos which include popular videos (e.g., they have a high view count or a high like rate). Their interaction with these new videos will inform future recommendations.

As part of our obligations under the DSA (Article 38), we introduced non-personalized feeds on our platform, which provide our European users with an alternative to recommender systems. They are able to turn off personalisation so that feeds show non-personalised content. For example, the For You feed, will instead show popular videos in their regions and internationally. See here.