#SocialMedia#TikTok#APIs: "We don’t have any way of validating whether the hashtags we selected captured all of the content on TikTok in the US about the war in Gaza. However, there are some signs we had decent coverage. Some of the hashtags were popular enough that we observed ‘trend chasing’, where creators will add many trending hashtags to unrelated posts. We also know our initial hashtag selection was overbroad because we had to remove some after our collection. This doesn’t mean we captured all relevant hashtags, of course! The research API lets you query data by hashtag, description, and user, so to a certain extent, you need to know what you’re looking for. The research API returns data about public videos, video comments, and user accounts. It allows fine-grained searching by keyword and hashtag, but there is no equivalent of the Twitter firehose. We are thinking through methods to estimate ‘top content’, and prior work from other researchers has attempted this for other platforms. Because of the very strong imbalance of views to content, to understand what (most) people are seeing, the top 1% of content appears to be a pretty good approximation. However, it clearly wouldn’t help researchers who wanted to study posting activity, either by itself or in connection to view activity."
