Is TikTok using 'Heating' button to secretly boost particular videos and promote content?

TikTok, a famous Chinese video-sharing app, has a "heating" button which allows some hand-picked videos to "achieve a certain number of video views", Forbes reported after reviewing internal documents and communications.

The media outlet said that sources and documents have revealed that the "heating" button is a manual push which is used by the staff at TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance.

Besides the algorithm that personalises a user's feed, the staff is also selecting specific videos secretly and eventually supercharging their distribution. This practice is known internally as "heating".

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As cited by the media outlet, an internal TikTok document titled MINT Heating Playbook mentions: "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%, which can have a significant impact on overall core metrics," the document further added.

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It is a known fact that tech companies follow the practice of amplifying specific posts to their users, but they label them as promoted content. But in the case of TikTok, the so-called "heating" was never made public. In case the secret practice is true, it can be termed as anti-competitive.

Forbes also mentioned that the process of heating has been used by TikTok to increase views of particular videos and lure influencers and brands to form a partnership.

This shows the company could be benefiting some users, but also being unfair to others.

As quoted by Forbes, Evelyn Douek, a professor at Stanford Law School and Senior Research Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said: "We think of social media as being very democratizing and giving everyone the same opportunity to reach an audience."

Douek also cautioned that "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."

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