OCTOBER 2025- Several staffers of The Washington Post – including two “graphics reporters” and a “political data reporter” – dove into the addictive properties of TikTok, a fascinating undertaking given that the Chinese-owned app didn’t exactly rush to cooperate on the project. No matter, the upshot was predictably grim – users get addicted quickly as the algorithms decide what short videos to hit you over the head with. Most of the data, it turns out, derives from survey results of WaPo readers. From the presentation:
TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, share little about how the app keeps users coming back. Journalists and researchers have utilized bot accounts to simulate how the recommendation system is tied to watch time and have conducted self-reported user surveys. But none of these approaches captures real human behavior.
So The Washington Post, through an unprecedented partnership with our readers, collected TikTok watch histories from 1,100 users. We created a database of roughly 15 million videos served up to them in a six-month period last year. Our analyses showed just how effective TikTok is at getting even its heaviest users to swipe more and watch more on its platform.
It’s only fitting that WaPo would tackle such a story with graphics – easier for millions of young TikTok viewers to digest it.