What Shapes Your TikTok Feed?
The For You Research Project examines TikTok's recommendation algorithm and its effects on Australian audiences, and how it influences what Australians see and create on the platform.
The research questions
What is recommended?
What content does TikTok recommend to Australian users, and how does this shape culture?
How is it experienced?
How do different people experience and interpret the algorithm in their everyday use of the platform?
How do creators adapt?
How do TikTok creators adapt their strategies to stay visible and relevant?
How we study it
The project combines data analysis, interviews and user participation across three research streams:
Platform analysis
Large-scale analysis of content and recommendation trends. The Data Hub supports this stream, turning shared feed data into analysable datasets.
User experiences
Interviews and data donations from everyday users, exploring how people experience and make sense of algorithmic recommendation.
Creator strategies
Working with content creators of all sizes to understand how they navigate visibility on the platform.
The team
The team brings together experts in digital media, platform studies and online culture at Australia's two leading universities for digital media research.
Chief Investigator in QUT's Digital Media Research Centre and Associate Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society.
Chief Investigator in QUT's Digital Media Research Centre and Associate Director of the national ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society.
Also Chief Investigator at The International Digital Policy Observatory and in the project "Emerging online safety issues: co-creating social media education with young people".
An interdisciplinary academic with expertise in digital platform policy and governance, researching how platforms exercise private power and the policy options for responding to it.
Researches social media cultures, platform governance, online harms and algorithmic systems.
Student member of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, researching AI-generated content, cultural production and creative labour in the platform economy.
Researches how content becomes popular on TikTok; also a product manager with a track record of delivering solutions that drive software growth.
Formerly a researcher and science communicator at centres focusing on digitalisation, democracy and AI; interested in digital users, platform governance and content moderation.
A media and communications academic researching emerging technologies, data, platforms, algorithms and AI, and how they intersect with socio-economic, cultural and political contexts.
Institutions & funding
The project is based at QUT's Digital Media Research Centre in Brisbane and at the University of Sydney, and is funded by the Australian Research Council (grant DP240102939). Our work is also supported by the Australian Internet Observatory (AIO), which received investment from the Australian Research Data Commons through the National Collaborative Infrastructure Strategy in partnership with a consortium of Australian universities.
Follow the project on LinkedIn or TikTok, or contact the team at info@foryouresearch.net. Questions and bug reports about the software itself are best raised on GitHub.