I was curious what a TikTok user might see if they made a fresh account. I provided no preferred content categories, and did not interact with any video in any way except the skip them.
In my first fifteen minutes, I received:
9 manosphere “inspiration” videos
The official accounts of Tucker Carlson and Vivek
2 clips from each Fox News, and tabloids New York Post and Metro
1 “America first” rando
1 Copaganda vid of “cool” new police robots
Elon’s nazi salute without context or commentary
@Haste Did you use a new computer and location for the test? There's a technique called "fingerprinting" used to track people. They try to find screen resolution, OS type, etc. in order to identify a user without needing to use cookies.
Some of what they can use may surprise you. For example,, they can use the TCP timestamp option to measure clock skew (each computer's clock runs at a slightly different rate) to help identify a computer.
@bzdev I am broadly aware of fingerprinting techniques. I didn’t control for them in this test, and would definitely need to do so in a formal one.