Just Another Hour on TikTok: ID sampling to obtain a complete slice of TikTok

Abstract

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.