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TikTok just announced the data it’s willing to share. What’s missing? | FSI

Is the new TikTok API going to be good enough for social media researchers?

In 2022, we analyzed over 100 hours of TikTok videos as part of the Stanford Internet Observatory’s efforts to study election rumors in the runup to the 2022 US midterms. It was a challenging process: we started by searching TikTok using keywords — think “election” or “vote.” But we soon realized a search-based approach has its limits. Keywords simply were not surfacing many videos that shared election rumors even though we found those videos promoted on the For You page (FYP). We are not alone in picking an imperfect method for our research plans — a method that is useful on other social media platforms, but seems to miss quite a lot of what is happening on TikTok. Indeed, a recent review of TikTok scholarship found that few papers use TikTok’s recommender system as the means for data collection; in most cases, researchers used within-reach collection methods without justifying why.

Source: TikTok just announced the data it’s willing to share. What’s missing? | FSI