TikTok employees can choose whether your video goes viral or not

It turns out TikTok employees have a say in what videos go viral - who knew?

According to a new report by Forbes has employees revealed they have the power to manually boost clips to give them a wider reach on the platform.

Six current and former employees of TikTok and its parent company ByteDance reportedly talked about a feature referred to internally as “heating” gives the employees the ability to make videos go viral.

They do so with a push of a button, which forces videos to go to the For You Pages of random users.

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“The heating feature refers to boosting videos into the For You feed through operation intervention to achieve a certain number of video views. The total video views of heated videos accounts for a large portion of the daily total video views, around 1-2 per cent, which can have a significant impact on overall core metrics,” an internal document obtained by Forbes stated.

Granted, TikTok maintains that the feature’s purpose is to “promote diverse content, push important information, and support creators.”

“We promote some videos to help diversify the content experience and introduce celebrities and emerging creators to the TikTok community,” a TikTok spokesperson toldInsider. “Only a few people, based in the US, have the ability to approve content for promotion in the US, and that content makes up approximately .002 per cent of videos in For You feeds.”

So now you know.

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