TikTok

A feed of short videos chosen for you by an algorithm, paid for by advertising.

Benchmark review. Giants are reviewed rarely, to show what the tools in the directory are measured against. This one is not listed in the directory, and it is an example, not a recommendation. Scores are our opinion on the six questions, based on public sources and dated October 2026.

TikTok is built around a For You feed that chooses short videos for you, and it is paid for by advertising. In January 2026 a US joint venture led by Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX took over its US operations, with ByteDance keeping a 19.9% stake. US user data and the retrained algorithm are hosted in Oracle's cloud, which changes who holds the data and does not change how the feed works. It is very good at what it does, so Delivery is a 2.

Arizona's attorney general sued TikTok this month over infinite scrolling, autoplay and reward loops that she says maximise compulsive use among minors, and other states have filed similar cases. Those are allegations, we have not seen TikTok's response, and we left them out of the score, which rests on how the product is built and paid for. We have not checked how much of your data you can export, so Lock-in is our estimate. As of October 2026 this is our opinion, based on the public sources named here, and if you spot an error, write to hello@toolsforconviviality.com and we will check it and correct it. Compare it with the tools in Social feeds.

What stands out

• An algorithm picks the videos for your For You feed, and advertising pays for it
• US operations moved to an Oracle-led joint venture in January 2026
• The legal cases are allegations and are not part of the score