According to six sources and documents reviewed by Forbes, TikTok and ByteDance employees frequently engage in “heating,” which is a manual process that guarantees certain videos receive a specific amount of views. According to one of those sources:“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. One document revealed that an account had received over 3 million views due to this type of “heating” incident. “We promote some videos to help diversify the content experience and introduce celebrities and emerging creators to the TikTok community. If TikTok is artificially inflating the view count of some videos through “heating,” it could skew the metrics that marketers use to evaluate the success of their campaigns.

Source: Forbes January 21, 2023 06:14 UTC