Comment by graeme
16 hours ago
Tiktok is actually surprisingly national in how it serves its content. If you're outside the US you don't see most American accounts except the ones that go very viral.
Edit: I should clarify. This might mean most content you see is English, if you're interested in English content. However it matters where the video was geographically uploaded from. If you upload a tiktok video and check the stats you'll see most views are from your region or country.
Tiktok shows videos locally, then regionally and then finally worldwide if yoo have a big hit.
It would be interesting to know what fraction of the English content people see is posted geographically from within America.
This hasn't been my experience, using TikTok from Switzerland, I almost exclusively see English language, with a focus on my interests
Switzerland has just 8 million people, which are divided into two big language groups. And most people speak (or at least understand) English. So, it's natural for the algorithm to converge to content in English.
Lived in Switzerland and this is really not true.
What I've learned is that since Switzerland has 3 official languages (German, French and Italian) children and teens at school focus on learning one of the other two regions they are not from.
In particular this leads to French and Italian cantons to be moderately fluent in each other's language. Strikingly when I lived in Lausanne, more people knew Italian than English. English was really not on their radar (plus, add that francophones are kind of elitist when it comes to languages and don't really like to consume content that is not in french).
In German speaking Switzerland proficiency in English was still subpar from most of the rest of Europe when walking in a shop or going to a restaurant.
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> And most people speak (or at least understand) English.
This is wrong. In cities where there's a lot of tourism, they might understand. Most Swiss people only speak their local languages (German or French). As for those living in Ticino, they tend to be better polyglots.
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This is simply not true. Even standard German is a second language in Switzerland. I’m Swiss.
It depends what you interact with. I tried it fresh today and it quickly decided I'm a Berliner muslim who likes Nigerian food because I lingered for a minute on something. That interest graph is very fast and volatile.
Uhh... that's kind of how these algorithms work. I presume you interact (i.e. don't scroll past) with a lot of the English posts. It's going to index on that and show you more English content. When I'm abroad, I might see a few posts in their native language but the algorithm will revert to showing English posts about the city/country once it realizes I'm not really jiving with Portuguese posts, for example.
An illiterate coworker of mine showed me his phone and asked for help. It was utterly amazing, he exclusively got videos from goat and donkey farmers. The most stunning part was that most of the videos were completely hilarious. People talking to their goat then the goat does what they say or the opposite on purpose.
i mean, we all have the algorithm tailored to what we want to see, so the parent comment here is kind of a moot point, right?
I joined TikTok and was immediately barraged with naked young girls. Haven't been back since.
My experience is that it serves you the content that you spent time watching and engaging with.
And it's quite easy to steer it towards a certain topic if you want to
I believe the algo is somewhat timezone based, too.
Very common for ppl to be served Chinese or asian influencer content after 12pm (EST). So common, in fact, most of the western users begin posting "whelp, time to go to bed!"
The majority of the content feels regional, though.
I've never used tiktok... Do you mean 12AM (midnight)? Or are people commonly in the habit of mid-afternoon naps?
12PM is Noon. Did you mean Midnight?
Canada and potentially the UK are gonna be having the biggest shock I guess. Potentially Australia too?
Might not be available in Canada that much longer https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/tiktok-ban-canada-operation...
The question is, was this a conscious human design decision or did the algorithm learn to do that by itself?
I would believe if someone said it was completely organic. It's just how Internet is and how social graphs build up. The typical American notion that the Internet is nearly 100% dominated by American English socio-cultural platform and English is the foundational language of the world's all cognitive processing is just an annoying megalomaniac hallucination.
English is used as a lot as a fallback language for inter-cultural exchanges. In that sense it's kind of dominating, but that's it. Intra-cultural communications happens in local languages, and even if that preferred language happened to be one of en-* locales, that only means everyone is functionally bilingual, and it doesn't mean cultural informational borders don't exist. Data still only goes through bridging connections.
Considering the algorithm did not crawl out of the primordial ooze unbidden by man I am going to guess the former.
The recommendation engine is at least partially learned so it’s fairly likely that it’s the latter
The algo learned "by itself", but humans set a objetive to optimize and then implemented it to do so as well as it they could.
So essentially both I guess?
It tends to get people annoyed if you don't. Facebook user distribution is like 12% Indian and 6% American. Twitter is(was) 34% English and 16% Japanese. Bluesky was at one point 43% Japanese. If your feed ISN'T filled with Hindi, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese and so on, with only one in five or less made in English sent from US, your feed is tampered with. But otherwise that social media would be genuinely less useful.
Mastodon only had the raw feed and that drove European network operators insane, so much so that they effectively GFW'd itself.
Why is that the question? If it learned to do it by itself it still is being allowed to do it by humans.
You don't deserve the downvotes from the immature peeps around here. Your question is 100% valid.
I would lean for the latter, the simple explanation may be that people just prefer local content.
As an American in the US, I get quite a bit of foreign and foreign language content under For You.
This is the inverse to the situation you describe but it makes me doubtful that non-US don't see a lot of American content.
The algo bends to your interests. But it's trivial to test the default reach if you ever post a video. They show stats for viewer location.
You can even find guides by people trying to make their phone seem american so they can reach us audiences.
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Source?
My anecdotal evidence of watching TikTok usage on others’ phones while riding subway systems in Paris suggest there’s plenty of English-language content out there.
in Morocco most of the adults speak French and Arabic, so when they need to speak to an Englisher they get some kids over to help because they all speak English from TikTok
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If its like Reels (I dont use tiktok) as soon as you are in France its only French content. Same for youtube.
I actually had to check if TikTok was subject to the French protection laws on localized media quotas. I see it applies to Netflix et al, but not directly to TikTok.
I don't think it does, I don't see any single content from my country's language. Tiktok is very good at adapting the content to you.
TikTok is surprisingly national at the surface level, but it is all coordinated back with the parent China based entities (ByteDance, Douyin, and the CCP), so that even if it is national, it upholds China’s national interests. See the story at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42739855 for more details. But basically, TikTok executives had to agree to let ByteDance monitor their personal devices, swear oaths to uphold various goals of the CCP (“national unity” “socialism” etc), report to both a US-based manager and a China-based manager, uphold the CCP’s moderation/censorship scheme, and so on. It is REALLY aggressive and unethical, but also reveals how subtly manipulative the entire system of TikTok is.
Do you think it would be possible to show this programmatically? As in scrape n posts from TikTok and Reels and show the first displays CCP tendencies?
Or is this like a general US freedom China dictator logic
It actually doesn't matter whether TT has done it already or not.
What matters is that it has the __capability__ of doing it, in ways that would be difficult to detect, when it proves expedient to do so.
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Your link doesn't appear to work
https://archive.is/4Y8w5
Oh weird - it works for me. Maybe the discussion got banned somehow? Here is the underlying story: https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...
You are conflating strong Chinese Communist control of the business with how the content behaves. TikTok is full of content that would put a Chinese person in prison.
See this 2019 article outlining Chinese Communist moderation policies that (obviously) were attached to the app when TikTok was new, but were removed for non-Chinese user communities.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...
There's a Chinese creator on there Huey Li who just made a whole video about that as part of a story about how, now living stateside, he can no longer write in his mother language