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Oct 3, 2025 Emily Baker White, a senior writer at Forbes and author of 'Every Screen on the Planet: The War Over TikTok,' discusses TikTok's fascinating algorithm, shaped by insights from young curators in Mexico City. She reveals how the platform used data from various sources to refine its recommendations and explains the controversial 'heating' feature that allowed manual boosts. The conversation delves into the implications of a U.S. takeover, questioning whether control over the algorithm would actually change user experience and content diversity.
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TikTok Reset Social Feed Norms
- TikTok's recommendation approach rewrote the social media playbook and forced rivals to copy it.
- Its scale gives it extraordinary power over what information and trends spread across society.
Early Human Curators Shaped TikTok
- ByteDance hired young local curators in Mexico City to tell them what was cool and what to show users.
- Jorge Reyes and others manually ranked videos early on, shaping the feed and training the algorithm.
The 'Heating' Button Amplified Content
- TikTok built an internal override called "heating" to manually boost videos by thousands of views.
- Heating served product, partnership, and personal ends, letting staff artificially amplify chosen content.
