2025/04/17 by Benjamin Steel, Steel, Benjamin, Miriam Schirmer +5 · 3 voices · 3 citations
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Digital Marketing and Social Media #Digital Media and Philosophy #Feature (linguistics) #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Range (aeronautics) #Sample (material) #Sampling (signal processing) #Timestamp
paper · pdf · doi:10.51685/jqd.2026.002
published in Journal of Quantitative Description Digital Media 6
openalex publication_date 2026/01/12 · openalex created_date 2026/01/15 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
TikTok is now a massive platform, and has a deep impact on global events. Despite preliminary studies, issues remain in determining fundamental characteristics of the platform. We develop a method to extract a representative sample of >99% of posts from a given time range on TikTok, and use it to collect all posts from a full hour on the platform, alongside all posts from a single minute from each hour of a day. Through this, we obtain post metadata, video media, and comments from a close-to-complete slice of TikTok, and report the critical statistics of the platform. Notably, we estimate a total of 269 million posts produced on the day we looked at, that 18% of videos on the platform feature children, and that at least 0.5% of posts contain artificial intelligence-generated content.