A recent study from Cornell University quantifies TikTok's massive scale, estimating 117 million videos were uploaded in a single day. Researchers used reverse-engineering techniques to assess platform activity, finding significant details about content trends, with one in five videos featuring children. The findings also revealed that posts timed to the 0th second of every minute tended to perform better, indicating potential algorithmic benefits or the influence of professional creators. This study aims to enhance understanding of social media and its societal impact.
The motivation is using this social media data to better understand society, says Jürgen Pfeffer, one of the study's coauthors and chair of computational science at the Technical University of Munich.
They estimated 117 million videos were uploaded on that single day. Roughly one in five featured children, based on estimates from an age classification engine the team trained.
The sheer scale of TikTok activity was astonishing, with the researchers capturing around five million videos in one hour and extrapolating up to 117 million for the entire day.
Videos posted precisely at the 0th second of each minute significantly outperformed others-suggesting timing tricks might influence the algorithm... due to professional creators scheduling their posts.
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