We teamed up with our audience to measure TikTok’s unmistakable draw

TikTok users speak almost reverently about the how the app’s algorithm recommends videos that are so eerily aligned with their tastes, it’s hard to put the app down.

The consequence of that personalization, however, is that everyone’s feed is so different that it’s difficult for social media researchers to tease apart how the algorithm works. We were sick of speculation. So The Post collected a trove of more than 1,100 TikTok users’ viewing histories — generously donated by fans of the paper’s own TikTok account — to dissect how people consume content on the social media platform and how the app’s recommendation system works. We also spoke with dozens of these participants about how they felt about their feeds.