TikTok on Friday announced that it is introducing a new “Topic Moderation” feature that will give users more control over what appears in their “For You” feed. The new feature is rolling out to users in the United States.
New tools allow you to customize your “For You” feed to show more or less of certain topics.
To access this feature, go to Settings, select “Content Settings” and then click on the “Manage Topics” option. From there, you can customize the settings for different topics such as sports, travel, humor, current events, dance, food, etc. You can move the slider to adjust how much or little of that kind of content you want to see in your For You feed.
If you're not sure what type of videos fall into a category, click the “Info” button next to the topic. For example, TikTok says that the “Creative Arts” topic includes “painting, drawing, graphic design, and art-related tutorials.”
Image credit: TikTok
TikTok says these choices will result in the app showing more or fewer topics in your “For You” feed. Of course, this doesn't affect content from accounts you follow. The company cautions that you shouldn't expect the customizations to be applied immediately, as it may take some time for the app to personalize your feed based on your choices.
TikTok updated its “For You” feed last year with a feature that allowed users to retrain the app's algorithm on the content they enjoyed, but this new feature allows for a more focused approach to customizing what you see on the platform, rather than simply starting over.
And while you can already let our algorithm know you don't want to see certain types of videos by long-pressing on a video and clicking the “Not Interested” button, now you can go directly into the settings and tell the app you don't want to see that type of content in your Recommended feed. While you can already filter content from your Recommended feed by selecting keywords and hashtags, this new feature eliminates the need to manually enter what you don't want to see.