TikTok and ByteDance employees regularly engage in “warm-ups,” a manual boost that ensures specific videos “achieve a certain number of video views,” according to six sources and documents reviewed by Forbes.
For years, TikTok has described its powerful For You page as a personalized feed ranked by an algorithm that predicts your interests based on your behavior on the app.
But that’s not the whole story, according to six current and former employees of TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, and internal documents and communications reviewed by Forbes. These sources reveal that in addition to letting the algorithm decide what goes viral, TikTok and ByteDance staff also secretly select specific videos and boost their distribution, using a practice known internally as “warm-ups.”
“The heating function refers to boosting videos in the For You feed through operation intervention to achieve a certain number of video views,” explains an internal TikTok document titled MINT Heating Playbook. “Total video views for hot videos account for a large portion of total daily video views, around 1-2%, which can have a significant impact on overall core metrics.”
TikTok has never publicly disclosed that it’s in the business of heating up, and while all tech giants engage, to some degree, in efforts to amplify specific posts for their users, they generally clearly label when they do so. Google, Meta, and TikTok, for example, have partnered with public health and election groups to distribute accurate information about COVID-19 and help users find their polling place, clearly revealing how and why they chose to promote these messages. (Disclaimer: In a previous life, I held political office at Facebook and Spotify.)
But sources told Forbes that TikTok has often used the heat to woo influencers and brands, luring them into partnerships by inflating their video view counts. This suggests that the heating has potentially benefited some influencers and brands, those with which TikTok has sought business relationships, at the expense of others with which it has not.
“We think social media is very democratizing and gives everyone an equal opportunity to reach an audience,” said Evelyn Douek, a professor at Stanford Law School and a senior fellow at Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute. But that’s not always true, she warned. “To some degree, the same old power structures are being replicated on social media as well, where the platform can decide winners and losers to some degree, and trade and other associations take advantage.”
The warm-up also reveals that, at least sometimes, the videos on the For You page aren’t there because TikTok thinks you’ll like them; instead, they are there because TikTok wants a particular brand or creator to get more views. And without tags, like those used for ads and sponsored content, it’s impossible to tell which is which.
Employees have also abused heating privileges. Three sources told Forbes they were aware of cases where employees used the heat incorrectly; one said employees have been known to heat their own accounts or those of their spouses in violation of company policy. Documents reviewed by Forbes showed that employees have heated their own accounts, as well as the accounts of people they have personal relationships with. According to a document, one such heating incident caused one account to receive more than three million views.
Do you have a tip about TikTok or ByteDance? Or about the social media strategy of Chinese state media? We would like to know about you. Email Emily Baker-White at [email protected] or contact Signal at 341-221-8664.
Additionally, the documents show that staff, including those at TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, and even contractors working with the company, exercise considerable discretion when deciding what content to promote. A document called TikTok’s Heating Policy says that employees can use heating to “attract influencers” and “promote diverse content,” but also to “drive important information” and “promote[e] relevant videos that were not detected by the recommendation algorithms”. Two sources told Forbes that employees have often felt left to their own devices in determining whether a video met these guidelines.
In response to a detailed set of questions about how and who has used the heating, TikTok spokesperson Jamie Favazza wrote: “We promoted some videos to help diversify the content experience and introduce up-and-coming celebrities and creators to the TikTok community. . Only a few people, based in the US, have the ability to approve content for promotion in the US, and that content makes up about 0.002% of the videos on For You feeds.”
The documentation on heating within TikTok and ByteDance is substantial, but poorly organized. Documents purporting to govern the heating exist across multiple teams and regions, including the Los Angeles-based Content Programming and Content Editing Team, and the China-based Live Platform and Product Operations Teams. In addition to the MINT Heat Playbook, there are documents titled MINT Heat Operation Policy 101, Heat Quota Guidelines, TikTok Heat Policy, and US Heat Strategy Guidelines.
These documents suggest that TikTok and ByteDance initially turned to heating for a mundane and legitimate business purpose: to diversify TikTok’s content away from lip-syncing and dancing teens, and toward videos that would interest more users. “The purpose of this feature is to promote diverse content, push relevant information, and support creators,” says MINT Heating Playbook. “If you make good use of it, heating resources will bring a leverage effect, a small amount of heating resources will lead to mid-range user growth and a more diverse content pool.”
A source told Forbes that the warm-up has also been used to fuel high-profile collaborations between TikTok and outside players, including NGOs and artists courted by the platform, and was also supposed to be used when a creator in a category (eg beauty ) created a video in another category (eg cooking). In those situations, the person said, warming up “can help the algorithm find the right audience.”
There is a fraught history of tech platforms using their discretion to increase the reach of specific posts. Human curation has helped platforms create safe experiences for children and rein in misinformation, but it has also led to claims that companies use curation to impose their own political preferences on users.
For TikTok, fears of political manipulation are related to concerns that the Chinese government could force the platform’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to amplify or suppress certain narratives on TikTok. TikTok has acknowledged that it previously censored China-critical content, and last year, former ByteDance employees told BuzzFeed News that another ByteDance app, a now-defunct news aggregator called TopBuzz, had pinned “pro-China messages” on the top of your news. food for American consumers. ByteDance denied the report.
TikTok declined to answer questions about whether employees located in China have ever heated content, or whether the company has ever heated content produced by the Chinese government or Chinese state media.
Following the publication of this story, TikTok spokeswoman Maureen Shanahan said in a statement: “Under the national security agreement that CFIUS is currently considering, all protocols and processes for promoting video in the United States would be auditable by CFIUS. and third party monitors; only vetted TikTok USDS staff would have the ability to “heat up” videos in the US. Additionally, Oracle’s source code review will verify that there are no alternative means of promoting the content.” Oracle did not immediately respond to a request for comments.
TikTok is currently negotiating a contract with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) which it says would address all national security issues raised by foreign ownership of the app. But a growing number of lawmakers are seeking to ban TikTok out of fear that the CFIUS deal may be too small, too late. Last month, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance admitted that a team of employees led by a Beijing-based executive had monitored the physical location of journalists, including this reporter, in an effort to identify their sources. ByteDance fired the employees involved in the surveillance.
In December, TikTok announced that it would add a new panel to recommended videos titled “Why This Video,” which would tell users how a certain video was chosen for them. Examples in the blog post, which touted the new feature as “meaningful transparency,” included explanations like “This video is popular in the United States” and “You are following [account]” — but the post did not mention heating.
Asked if the new feature would reveal when videos had heated up, Favazza wrote: “We are continuing our work to expand our ‘why this video’ feature and provide more granularity and transparency to content recommendations.”
Douek, the Stanford professor, said revealing where and how TikTok uses heating “would be a first step” in getting users comfortable with the tool. “But sometimes, the reason why you don’t [use clearer labels] it is because transparency allows criticism”.
This story has been updated with additional comments from TikTok.
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