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Abstract

TikTok is a relatively novel and widely popular media platform. In response
to its expanding user base and cultural impact, researchers are turning to
study the platform; however, TikTok, like many social media platforms,
restricts external access to data. Prior works have acquired data from scraping
the platform, user self-reports, and from accounts created by researchers for
the study's purpose. Existing techniques, while yielding important insights,
contain limitations for gathering large-scale quantitative insights on how real
TikTok users behave on the platform. We bridge this research gap by
implementing a data donation system to collect TikTok data. Our system
leverages users' right to access their data enabled by the EU's GDPR
regulation. We recruit 347 TikTok users, ask them to request their data from
TikTok, and then use our system to customize, anonymize, and donate their data.
We collect 4.9M videos viewed 9.2M times by our participants -- and associated
engagement metrics -- to analyze how people consume content on TikTok, how
prevalent liking behavior is on TikTok, and whether there are substantial
differences across our participants' demographics. We conclude our work by
discussing the lessons learned and future avenues for implementing data
donation systems, which we believe offer a promising avenue for collecting user
behavioral traces to understand social phenomena through the lens of the Web.