The beauty of TikTok's secret, surprising, and eerily accurate recommendation algorithms

In the hours after she shared this makeup experiment, it was shown to hundreds of thousands of people on their "For You" pages, the lifeblood of TikTok. It wasn't obvious to her why this particular post was suddenly so visible, except that TikTok's recommendation algorithms had made it so. Since TikTok launched in China in 2016, it has become one of the most engaging and fastest-growing social media platforms in the world. It's been downloaded more than 2.6 billion times globally and has 100 million users in the US. And the unique way it finds and serves up content is a big part of its appeal.