Related papers: AutoLike: Auditing Social Media Recommendations th…

Social media platforms have become an integral part of everyday life, serving as a primary source of news and information for many users. These platforms increasingly rely on personalised recommendation systems that shape what users see and…

Modern algorithmic recommendation systems seek to engage users through behavioral content-interest matching. While many platforms recommend content based on engagement metrics, others like TikTok deliver interest-based content, resulting in…

Recommender systems on social media increasingly mediate how users encounter mental health content, yet it remains unclear whether they distinguish help-seeking from distress expression. We conduct a controlled 7-day audit of TikTok's "For…

Personalization algorithms are ubiquitous in modern social computing systems, yet their effects on comment sections remain underexplored. In this work, we conducted an algorithmic auditing experiment to examine comment personalization on…

Recommendation algorithms for social media feeds often function as black boxes from the perspective of users. We aim to detect whether social media feed recommendations are personalized to users, and to characterize the factors contributing…

TikTok currently is the fastest growing social media platform with over 1 billion active monthly users of which the majority is from generation Z. Arguably, its most important success driver is its recommendation system. Despite the…

We demonstrate that effortlessly accessible digital records of behavior such as Facebook Likes can be obtained and utilized to automatically distinguish a wide range of highly delicate personal traits including: life satisfaction, cultural…

Opaque algorithms disseminate and mediate the content that users consume on online social media platforms. This algorithmic mediation serves users with contents of their liking, on the other hand, it may cause several inadvertent risks to…

Intelligent algorithms increasingly shape the content we encounter and engage with online. TikTok's For You feed exemplifies extreme algorithm-driven curation, tailoring the stream of video content almost exclusively based on users'…

Social media platforms are constantly shifting towards algorithmically curated content based on implicit or explicit user feedback. Regulators, as well as researchers, are calling for systematic social media algorithmic audits as this shift…

Like other social media, TikTok is embracing its use as a search engine, developing search products to steer users to produce searchable content and engage in content discovery. Their recently developed product search recommendations are…

With over 500 million tweets posted per day, in Twitter, it is difficult for Twitter users to discover interesting content from the deluge of uninteresting posts. In this work, we present a novel, explainable, topical recommendation system,…

Recommender system is one of the most critical technologies for large internet companies such as Amazon and TikTok. Although millions of users use recommender systems globally everyday, and indeed, much data analysis work has been done to…

Users of social media platforms based on recommendation systems (e.g. TikTok, X, YouTube) strategically interact with platform content to influence future recommendations. On some such platforms, users have been documented to form…

Personalized recommendation algorithms, like those on YouTube, significantly shape online content consumption. These systems aim to maximize engagement by learning users' preferences and aligning content accordingly but may unintentionally…

Researchers use information about the amount of time people spend on digital media for numerous purposes. While social media platforms commonly do not allow external access to measure the use time directly, a usual alternative method is to…

Autocomplete is a popular search feature that predicts queries based on user input and guides users to a set of potentially relevant suggestions. In this study, we examine what YouTube autocompletes suggest to users seeking information…

TikTok has seen exponential growth as a platform, fuelled by the success of its proprietary recommender algorithm which serves tailored content to every user - though not without controversy. Users complain of their content being unfairly…

An increasing reliance on recommender systems has led to concerns about the creation of filter bubbles on social media, especially on short video platforms like TikTok. However, their formation is still not entirely understood due to the…

This paper investigates the effectiveness of TikTok's enforcement mechanisms for limiting the exposure of harmful content to youth accounts. We collect over 7000 videos, classify them as harmful vs not-harmful, and then simulate…