What is Not For You?

TikTok, the world’s most popular social video platform, uses an algorithm to automatically show users things they may find interesting. Users can turn off auto-following and videos featuring their friends, but the algorithm still shows them many videos, including some they may not want to see, and TikTok remains a content recommendation engine for users’ social interactions. Users can also turn off posts featuring their friends and videos with tags they don’t like.

This new piece of art presents an “automated confusion system” designed to mislead TikTok’s video recommendation algorithm. This means that the system’s recommendation engine cannot distinguish between good and bad posts, videos, and tags, and so it is possible to see the algorithm’s response in real-time when it’s no longer made “For You”. With this automated system, we’re able to create videos of our own that would not appear to be featured on TikTok in the future, and we’re able to show the algorithm’s reaction when it’s no longer “For You”.

What we’ve created is a new character, a new personality-agnostic “Not For You” page, and a “Not For You” video. Our “Not For You” character is able to navigate the website, clicking on videos and hashtags and users to find the nooks and crannies TikTok’s algorithm doesn’t show us, to reveal those videos its content moderators suppress, and to surface speech the company hopes to hide.