A TikTok spokesperson said in a statement: “We are currently experimenting with a new way for people to share TikTok videos that they enjoy, and the feature appears as a yellow “Repost” button along with the app’s other sharing features, and reports say that reposting the video will not be done to your profile. But it will push the video to your friends, and you can also add a short comment that appears with the clip so your friends can see “Why you’re reposting this video.”
And while TikTok has long been known to users who endlessly remix and reshare each other’s clips, the repost button is the first time the app has been like a retweet, the ability to quickly reshare a video from your feed as is. As TechCrunch points out, TikTok may handle the feature with caution because post recycling is so easy it can pollute users’ For You feeds that are known to be over-personalised.
This may be why the company is limiting the appearance of reposts to friends who follow each other, at least for now.
Elsewhere, the company is looking at other ways to mix the types of videos people watch into their recommendations, including reducing “clusters of groups” in potentially problematic content.
