TikTok Apparently Has A Secret ‘Heating’ Button To Make Any Video Viral

Wish to gain clout? As it seems, faking it to make it doesn’t always lie in the hands of the fame-seeker.

Citing six current and former employees and documents, Forbes says it has learned of a private “heating” functionality that, when triggered, can boost posts to reach “a certain number” of views. The report shares that workers at TikTok and its parent company ByteDance have taken advantage of the internal feature to ramp up visibility for content creators and for personal interests.

The so-called “heating button” casts some doubt on TikTok’s all-powerful ‘For You Page’, often touted as highly personalized to individual viewing preferences. Unlike rivaling social networks like Meta and YouTube, which explain to users why certain content is being displayed to them, TikTok has never openly disclosed that posts aren’t always prioritized by the algorithm, says the report.

An internal document entitled the ‘MINT Heating Playbook’ describes that “a large portion” of daily video views—“around 1-2%”—on affected videos has to do with heating. Internal intervention has a “significant” effect on the overall core metrics of “heated videos,” it admits.

TikTok frequently engages in heating to attract brands and influencers, promising to increase eyeballs in hopes of striking partnerships with them, the sources purport. They allege that the privilege has been exploited by some employees, against TikTok’s company policy, to promote their own or their spouses’ accounts.

All this demystifies the notion that social media is as democratized as people want it to be, cautions Evelyn Douek, a professor at Stanford Law School and Senior Research Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Covert heating suggests that companies still have the final word on what is hot or not.

A spokesperson justifies that TikTok sometimes boosts content to draw attention to celebrities or emerging creators, and that “only a few people” in the US have the ability to hand-pick videos for promotional purposes. They add that “approximately .002%” of human-curated posts appear on For You pages.

TikTok did announce in December last year that it would explain the magic behind its algorithm with a new ‘Why This Video’ feature. Asked if the company will declare insights on heating in this addition, the spokesperson tells Forbes that the app is currently working to expand the tool to offer “more granularity and transparency.”

[via Forbes and Hootsuite, cover illustration 177436795 © Eugenebsov | Dreamstime.com]