Brian Ler on WNYC to close out the show today.

We'll talk about TikTok, including your calls on this question.

Does the TikTok algorithm or recommendation engine know you better than you know yourself?

And who does TikTok have you pinned down as?

212-433 W-NYC, 212-433-9-6-9-2.

Does TikTok know you better than you know yourself? Or if not, who does it have you pegged as?

212-433-962. And we're going to talk about this with John Herman, contributing writer at New York

Magazine's Intelligencer. He's their tech columnist. And in a recent article about this, Herman challenges the perception

that TikTok's algorithm is an all-powerful secret sauce that can read your mind better than users

know themselves. Instead, he argues that the real mystery lies in the user's willingness to

repeatedly engage with the platform, even if it feels like being a test

subject in exchange for entertainment. The article also explores how TikTok's Chinese ownership

has shaped the scrutiny and perception of the platform. John Herman, again, tech columnist for

New York Magazine's Intelligencer, joins us now.. Hey John, welcome back to WNYC.

Thanks so much for having me. So not the algorithm itself, something about the users comprises

the secret sauce. Want to explain? Yeah. So the TikTok's big innovation was forefronting recommendations.

If you think about Facebook in the old days, you sort of knew why you were seeing things.

You were friends with certain people.

You followed certain topics or pages.

Those things would show up a lot because that was the arrangement that you made.

Over time, Facebook and other platforms started making recommendations from elsewhere, based on invisible calculations that you made. Over time, Facebook and other platforms started making recommendations

from elsewhere based on invisible calculations that you weren't really a part of. TikTok jumped

...