TikTok’s biggest hits are videos you’ve probably never seen

It’s the most wonderful time of the year: when TikTok publishes its annual roundup of the biggest hits, and I get to see what everyone else has been doing on the app all year.

Despite the hold TikTok has on our cultural and political psyche, it’s hard to tell what exactly is going on across the platform. Seeing something served up on your For You page doesn’t mean it’s a thing all the kids are doing — it just means that the algorithm decided you might watch it based on what you spend your time doing on the app. Out of the bottomless supply of videos posted each day, you’re being fed everything from celebrity clips with millions of views to videos from random accounts with zero likes and zero comments. None of our For You pages look the…

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