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INNOVATION DAILY COVER

TikTok’s Secret ‘Heating’

Button Can Make Anyone
Go Viral

ILLUSTRATION BY GRACELYNN WAN FOR FORBES

Emily Baker-White Forbes Staff Follow

Jan 20, 2023, 10:15am EST

TikTok and ByteDance employees

regularly engage in “heating,” a manual
push that ensures specific videos
“achieve a certain number of video
views,” according to six sources and
documents reviewed by Forbes.

For years, TikTok has described its powerful For You

Page as a personalized feed ranked by an algorithm that
predicts your interests based on your behavior in the app.

But that’s not the full story, according to six current and
former employees of TikTok and its parent company,
ByteDance, and internal documents and communications
reviewed by Forbes. These sources reveal that in addition
to letting the algorithm decide what goes viral, staff at
TikTok and ByteDance also secretly hand-pick specific
videos and supercharge their distribution, using a
practice known internally as “heating.”
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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,” an internal TikTok
document titled MINT Heating Playbook explains. “The
total video views of heated videos accounts for a large
portion of the daily total video views, around 1-2%, which
can have a significant impact on overall core metrics.”

TikTok has never publicly disclosed that it engages in

heating — and while all tech giants engage, to some
degree, in efforts to amplify specific posts to their users,
they usually clearly label when they do so. Google, Meta,
and TikTok itself, for example, have partnered with
public health and elections groups to distribute accurate
information about COVID-19 and help users find their
polling place, making clear disclosures about how and
why they chose to promote these messages. (Disclaimer:
In a former life, I held policy positions at Facebook and
Spotify.)

But sources told Forbes that TikTok has often used

heating to court influencers and brands, enticing them
into partnerships by inflating their videos’ view count.
This suggests that heating has potentially benefitted
some influencers and brands — those with whom TikTok
has sought business relationships — at the expense of
others with whom it has not.
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“We think of social media as being very democratizing

and giving everyone the same opportunity to reach an
audience,” said Evelyn Douek, a professor at Stanford
Law School and Senior Research Fellow at the Knight
First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. But
that’s not always true, she cautioned. “To some degree,
the same old power structures are replicating in social
media as well, where the platform can decide winners
and losers to some degree, and commercial and other
kinds of partnerships take advantage.”

Heating also reveals that, at least sometimes, videos on

the For You page aren’t there because TikTok thinks
you’ll like them; instead, they're there because TikTok
wants a particular brand or creator to get more views.
And without labels, like those used for ads and sponsored
content, it’s impossible to tell which is which.

Employees have also abused heating privileges. Three

sources told Forbes they were aware of instances where
heating was used improperly by employees; one said that
employees have been known to heat their own or their
spouses’ accounts in violation of company policy.
Documents reviewed by Forbes showed that employees
have heated their own accounts, as well as accounts of
people with whom they have personal relationships.
According to one document, a heating incident of this
type led to an account receiving more than three million
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views.

Got a tip about TikTok or ByteDance? Or about

Chinese state media’s social media strategy? We'd
like to hear from you. Email Emily Baker-White at
ebakerwhite@forbes.com or reach out on Signal at
341-221-8664.

Moreover, documents show that staff — including those

at TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and even
contractors working with the company — exercise
considerable discretion in deciding which content to
promote. A document called TikTok Heating Policy says
that employees may use heating to “attract influencers”
and “promote diverse content,” but also to “push
important information” and “promot[e] relevant videos
that were missed by the recommendations algorithms.”
Two sources told Forbes employees have often felt left to
their own devices to determine whether a video fell
within these guidelines.

In response to a detailed set of questions about how and

by whom heating has been used, TikTok spokesperson
Jamie Favazza wrote: “We promote some videos to help
diversify the content experience and introduce celebrities
and emerging creators to the TikTok community. Only a
few people, based in the U.S., have the ability to approve
content for promotion in the U.S., and that content
makes up approximately .002% of videos in For You
feeds.”

Documentation about heating within TikTok and

ByteDance is substantial, but poorly organized.
Documents purporting to govern heating exist across
multiple teams and regions, including the Content
Programming and Content Editorial Team based in Los
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Angeles, and the Live Platform and Product Operational
Teams, based in China. In addition to the MINT Heating
Playbook, there are documents titled MINT Heating
Operation Policy 101, Heating Quota Guidelines, TikTok
Heating Policy and U.S. Heating Strategy Guidelines.

These documents suggest that TikTok and ByteDance

initially turned to heating for a mundane, legitimate
business purpose: to diversify TikTok’s content away
from lip synching and dancing teens, and toward videos
that would interest more users. “The purpose of this
feature is to promote diverse content, push important
information, and support creators,” says the MINT
Heating Playbook. “If you make good use of it, heating
resources will bring a leverage effect, a small amount of
heating resources will bring about growth of midrange
users, and a more diverse content pool.”

One source told Forbes that heating has also been used to
boost high-profile collaborations between TikTok and
external actors, including NGOs and artists being courted
by the platform, and that it was also supposed to be used
when a creator in one category (e.g. beauty) created a
video in another category (e.g. cooking). In those
situations, the person said, heating “can help the
algorithm find the right audience.”

There is a fraught history of tech platforms using their

discretion to increase specific posts’ reach. Human
curation has helped platforms create safe experiences for
children and keep misinformation in check, but it has
also led to claims that companies use curation to impose
their own political preferences on users.
For TikTok, fears of political manipulation are tied to
concern that the Chinese government could coerce the
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platform’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, into amplifying or
suppressing certain narratives on TikTok. TikTok has
acknowledged that it previously censored content critical
of China, and last year, former ByteDance employees told
BuzzFeed News that another ByteDance app, a now-
defunct news aggregator called TopBuzz, had pinned
“pro-China messages” to the top of its news feed for U.S.
consumers. ByteDance denied the report.

TikTok declined to answer questions about whether

employees located in China have ever heated content, or
whether the company has ever heated content produced
by the Chinese government or Chinese state media.

After this story published, TikTok spokesperson Maureen

Shanahan said in a statement: “Under the national
security agreement currently being considered by CFIUS,
all protocols and processes for promoting videos in the
United States would be auditable by CFIUS and third
party monitors; only vetted TikTok USDS personnel
would have the ability to "heat" videos in the U.S. In
addition, source code review by Oracle will verify that
there are no alternate means of promoting content.”
Oracle did not immediately respond to a comment
request.

TikTok is currently negotiating a contract with the

Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States
(CFIUS) that it says would address all national security
issues raised by the app’s foreign ownership. But an
increasing number of lawmakers are seeking to ban
TikTok over fears that the CFIUS agreement may be too
little, too late. Last month, TikTok parent company
ByteDance admitted that a team of employees led by a
Beijing-based executive had surveilled the physical
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location of journalists, including this reporter, in an
effort to identify their sources. ByteDance fired
employees involved in the surveillance.

MORE FROM FORBES

TikTok's China Problem

By Emily Baker-White

In December, TikTok announced that it would add a new

panel to recommended videos titled “Why This Video,”
which would tell users how a given video had been
chosen for them. Examples in the blog post, which touted
the new feature as “meaningful transparency,” included
explanations like ‘This video is popular in the United
States” and “you are following [account]” — but the post
didn’t mention heating.

When asked whether the new feature would disclose

when videos had been heated, Favazza wrote, “we're
continuing our work to expand our 'why this video'
feature and provide more granularity and transparency
to content recommendations.”

Douek, the Stanford professor, said disclosing where and

how TikTok uses heating “would be a first step” to getting
users comfortable with the tool. “But sometimes, the
reason why they don’t [use clearer labels] is because
transparency allows for criticism.”

This story has been updated with additional comment

from TikTok.