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Tiktok is actually surprisingly national in how it serves its content. If you're outside the US you don't see most American accounts except the ones that go ver
by graeme 2y ago
Tiktok is actually surprisingly national in how it serves its content. If you're outside the US you don't see most American accounts except the ones that go very viral.
Edit: I should clarify. This might mean most content you see is English, if you're interested in English content. However it matters where the video was geographically uploaded from. If you upload a tiktok video and check the stats you'll see most views are from your region or country.
Tiktok shows videos locally, then regionally and then finally worldwide if yoo have a big hit.
It would be interesting to know what fraction of the English content people see is posted geographically from within America.
- fouronnes3 2y agoThe question is, was this a conscious human design decision or did the algorithm learn to do that by itself?
- moralestapia 2y agoYou don't deserve the downvotes from the immature peeps around here. Your question is 100% valid. I would lean for the latter, the simple explanation may be that people just prefer local content.
- jrflowers 2y agoConsidering the algorithm did not crawl out of the primordial ooze unbidden by man I am going to guess the former.
- markeroon 2y agoThe recommendation engine is at least partially learned so it’s fairly likely that it’s the latter
- svnt 2y agoWhy is that the question? If it learned to do it by itself it still is being allowed to do it by humans.
- mrbungie 2y agoThe algo learned "by itself", but humans set a objetive to optimize and then implemented it to do so as well as it they could. So essentially both I guess?
- numpad0 2y agoIt tends to get people annoyed if you don't. Facebook user distribution is like 12% Indian and 6% American. Twitter is(was) 34% English and 16% Japanese. Bluesky was at one point 43% Japanese. If your feed ISN'T filled with Hindi, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese and so on, with only one in five or less made in English sent from US, your feed is tampered with. But otherwise that social media would be genuinely less useful. Mastodon only had the raw feed and that drove European network operators insane, so much so that they effectively GFW'd itself.
- numpad0 2y agoI would believe if someone said it was completely organic. It's just how Internet is and how social graphs build up. The typical American notion that the Internet is nearly 100% dominated by American English socio-cultural platform and English is the foundational language of the world's all cognitive processing is just an annoying megalomaniac hallucination. English is used as a lot as a fallback language for inter-cultural exchanges. In that sense it's kind of dominating, but that's it. Intra-cultural communications happens in local languages, and even if that preferred language happened to be one of en-* locales, that only means everyone is functionally bilingual, and it doesn't mean cultural informational borders don't exist. Data still only goes through bridging connections.
- dayjah 2y agoSource? My anecdotal evidence of watching TikTok usage on others’ phones while riding subway systems in Paris suggest there’s plenty of English-language content out there.
- permo-w 2y agoin Morocco most of the adults speak French and Arabic, so when they need to speak to an Englisher they get some kids over to help because they all speak English from TikTok
- paulg2222 2y ago[dead]
- prmoustache 2y agoI think it really depends on the size of the population speaking a language. For instance my partner sees almost only spanish content, and a huge majority is from latin america. We are living in Europe.
- MasterScrat 2y agoThis hasn't been my experience, using TikTok from Switzerland, I almost exclusively see English language, with a focus on my interests
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pepinator 2y agoSwitzerland has just 8 million people, which are divided into two big language groups. And most people speak (or at least understand) English. So, it's natural for the algorithm to converge to content in English.
- Pooge 2y ago> And most people speak (or at least understand) English. This is wrong. In cities where there's a lot of tourism, they might understand. Most Swiss people only speak their local languages (German or French). As for those living in Ticino, they tend to be better polyglots.
- Lukas_Skywalker 2y agoThat doesn‘t match my experience. About 40% of all Swiss inhabitants speak English at least once a week [1]. Anecdotally, I can't think of a single acquaintance younger than 50 years old that doesn't speak fluently. Everyone in Switzerland learns English at school for at least five years. Most even for seven years. Some of my German speaking friends even talk in English to French speaking people, even when both have learned the other‘s respective language at school. [1]: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/de/home/statistiken/bevoelkerung/sprachen-religionen/sprachen.html https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/de/home/statistiken/bevoelkerun...
- Pooge 2y ago> Everyone in Switzerland learns English at school for at least five years. Most even for seven years. We learn the other's respective language for 7 years, too. Yet, as you pointed out, people speak in English because there is no willingness to learn and apply the other's language. Some of my friends speak English fluently, but I have a very hard bias as I work in IT. My whole family doesn't speak any language other than French. Most of the people I've been to school with don't come close to speaking English casually. None would watch an English content creator. Due to the shared heritage between the English and German languages, perhaps it's different in the German-speaking region. If you ask someone slightly complicated English questions, they might not be completely lost - after all, some words share the same etymology. But Switzerland is absolutely not an English-speaking country at all.
- ehsankia 2y agoCanada and potentially the UK are gonna be having the biggest shock I guess. Potentially Australia too?
- empressplay 2y agoMight not be available in Canada that much longer https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/tiktok-ban-canada-operations-what-it-means-1.7377435 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/tiktok-ban-canada-operation...
- worthless-trash 2y agoThe vidoes that I see are pretty much spread across the world, not a huge US influence, doubting any shock will happen.
- the_clarence 2y agoIf its like Reels (I dont use tiktok) as soon as you are in France its only French content. Same for youtube.
- qingcharles 2y agoI actually had to check if TikTok was subject to the French protection laws on localized media quotas. I see it applies to Netflix et al, but not directly to TikTok.
- the_clarence 2y agoYeah thats why Netflix has to produce so much french content, they need 60% of their content to be french but there is not enough lol. Thats how we got call my agent
- runjake 2y agoAs an American in the US, I get quite a bit of foreign and foreign language content under For You. This is the inverse to the situation you describe but it makes me doubtful that non-US don't see a lot of American content.
- graeme 2y agoThe algo bends to your interests. But it's trivial to test the default reach if you ever post a video. They show stats for viewer location. You can even find guides by people trying to make their phone seem american so they can reach us audiences.
- spandrew 2y agoI believe the algo is somewhat timezone based, too. Very common for ppl to be served Chinese or asian influencer content after 12pm (EST). So common, in fact, most of the western users begin posting "whelp, time to go to bed!" The majority of the content feels regional, though.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoTikTok is surprisingly national at the surface level, but it is all coordinated back with the parent China based entities (ByteDance, Douyin, and the CCP), so that even if it is national, it upholds China’s national interests. See the story at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42739855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42739855 for more details. But basically, TikTok executives had to agree to let ByteDance monitor their personal devices, swear oaths to uphold various goals of the CCP (“national unity” “socialism” etc), report to both a US-based manager and a China-based manager, uphold the CCP’s moderation/censorship scheme, and so on. It is REALLY aggressive and unethical, but also reveals how subtly manipulative the entire system of TikTok is.
- ghfhghg 2y agoYour link doesn't appear to work
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoOh weird - it works for me. Maybe the discussion got banned somehow? Here is the underlying story: https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths-china-socialist-system-court-documents/ https://dailycaller.com/2025/01/14/tiktok-forced-staff-oaths...
- TaurenHunter 2y agohttps://archive.is/4Y8w5 https://archive.is/4Y8w5
- gunian 2y agoDo you think it would be possible to show this programmatically? As in scrape n posts from TikTok and Reels and show the first displays CCP tendencies? Or is this like a general US freedom China dictator logic
- insane_dreamer 2y agoIt actually doesn't matter whether TT has done it already or not. What matters is that it has the __capability__ of doing it, in ways that would be difficult to detect, when it proves expedient to do so.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Kkoala 2y agoMy experience is that it serves you the content that you spent time watching and engaging with. And it's quite easy to steer it towards a certain topic if you want to
- realusername 2y agoI don't think it does, I don't see any single content from my country's language. Tiktok is very good at adapting the content to you.
- SALCKIN 2y agoReply
- Kiro 2y agoYeah, I never get any views from the US on my videos even though they are in English.