The creepy TikTok algorithm doesn't know you...
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It’s a truth universally acknowledged that “the algorithm” knows you better than you know yourself. A computer can supposedly predict whether you’ll quit your job or break up with your partner. With 1,000 words of your writing, it can determine your age within four years. And no algorithm seems closer to omniscience than TikTok’s, which is reportedly helping users discover their sexuality and unpack their childhood trauma. Whereas Facebook asks you to set up a profile, and hand over a treasure trove of personal information in the process, TikTok simply notices—or seems to. The results can feel magical, writes Jess Joho in Mashable, as if TikTok is “reading your soul like some sort of divine digital oracle, prying open layers of your being never before known to your own conscious mind.”
Like any algorithm, TikTok’s divinatory properties are just the end result of a series of repeated steps. When someone creates a new account, the algorithm targets them with a variety of popular videos designed to test their response to broad categories of content, from viral dances to home repairs, according to a recent Wall Street Journal investigation. When the newspaper set 100-plus bots loose on TikTok, the platform’s “rabbit holing” keyed in on every bot’s preprogrammed interests in less than two hours.
So although TikTok seems to uncover things about users that they didn’t necessarily know about themselves, in reality it’s more accurate to say that TikTok shows you where your attention already goes—or would go, if you were freed from the social norms that keep your curiosity corralled offline. While Joho wrote in Mashable that “algorithms knew I was bi before I did,” she ultimately concluded her breakthrough was less about the algorithm’s ability to reveal her desires and more about the power of heteronormativity to conceal them. In these moments, TikTok is like a hotel vanity mirror, magnifying parts of your reflection you may have otherwise glossed over. Such high resolution can be revealing, but users err in treating it as anything more mystical.
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https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-a...tm_source=digg