Thanks that's better than what I was able to find but it's still more colored than I'd like.

Your framing is way more straightforward than theirs.

k00b

How to make a viral platfrom

Michelson_Morley

For sure. I think I read about it in the sort-of-classic "Enshittification" article on Wired. 

https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

A few pages down is the text

> TikTok's parent company, citing multiple internal sources, revealing the existence of a "heating tool" that TikTok employees use to push videos from select accounts into millions of viewers' feeds.

> These videos go into TikTok users' For You feeds, which TikTok misleadingly describes as being populated by videos "ranked by an algorithm that predicts your interests based on your behavior in the app." In reality, For You is only sometimes composed of videos that TikTok thinks will add value to your experience—the rest of the time, it's full of videos that TikTok has inserted in order to make creators think that TikTok is a great place to reach an audience.