From 1,100 users’ donated data, we analyzed the behavior of TikTok’s algorithm and found it favors mental health content

I led a collaboration across numerous desks in which we asked our readers to share their TikTok watch histories with us to help understand the algorithm. In this story, we found that TikTok’s algorithm favors mental health content, making it hard for users to remove it from their feeds – based on a new “stickiness” metric I devised to capture the different responses of users’ feeds to a single video being skipped or watched by a user. The series won a National Press Club award, a SABEW award, and was a finalist for an Online Journalism Award. Methodology: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/07/tiktok-app-study-user-behavior-addiction/