A horror lede from Bloomberg's Olivia Carville:
When TikTok tweaked its algorithm in 2021 to stop users from being overwhelmed with harmful content, the company didn’t roll out the safer version to everyone, a confidential internal document shows. Instead, to see if the change might reduce the app’s stickiness, the company conducted an experiment. It created a control group of 10% of US users — at the time, that would have been about 15 million people — who kept the old version of the app. This group, according to the document, included 16-year-old Chase Nasca. TikTok’s algorithm pushed him thousands of videos about suicide, sadness, hopelessness and loneliness, right up until he killed himself.
TikTok Withheld a Safety Feature From Millions. One Died by Suicidebloomberg.comA confidential document says an algorithm adjustment was kept from many users “by design,” as part of an experiment to measure engagement.