TikTok: This Is The Secret Behind Viral Videos – What Its “Hidden Button” Does   

Thought every video on For You was personalized to your tastes?

Think every video you see on your For You TikTok page is personalized to your tastes and activity? TikTok has been advocating just that for years, but former and current employees of ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, are uncovering the truth behind the viral videos of the most famous social platform. 

And yes, there may be the algorithm that decides which videos will be shown on the FYP feed that all TikTokers are dying to master, but internal documents and messages reviewed by Forbes reveal that it’s not so much algorithm-driven . 

It is said that TikTok staff chooses – apart from the algorithm – which videos are promoted with a ” hidden button ” called ” heating ” in the language of its employees, which “manually” boosts their reach. In practice, some employees choose which videos go viral . 

According to TikTok’s leaked internal document, the heating is described as an intervention on the For You page to promote the videos . In fact, the total views of videos that are promoted secretly thanks to human intervention, represent a large part of the total daily video views on FYP, which corresponds to a percentage of 1-2%, but can have a significant impact on the key metrics on the whole . 

Forbes’ same sources say that TikTok is using “heating” to boost the number of views of videos posted by influencers and companies, with the aim of luring them for a possible future collaboration. On the one hand, this potentially benefits a percentage of brands and influencers, on the other hand, it comes at the expense of others, whom the platform marginalises. 

The heating phenomenon has reached the point where even ByteDance employees take advantage of it to “heat” their own videos or those of their relatives. 

For its part, TikTok of course does not publicly admit that it uses this tactic.