Recently, by the start of this year, there has been weird search recommendations within the Tiktok searchbar feature, providing messages like: “STOP CLOSING YOUR DOOR AT NIGHT” and “OPEN YOUR EYES AND LOOK AT WHAT YOU DID” to a big variety of users on the platform.

Many users originally thought the phrases were real, personal messages or system alerts targeted to themselves. But the real reason on why there are these weird recommendations and where they originally came from is the result of viral trolling being done by unknown users to mislead and misinform regular users.

This is through the manipulation of the AI algorithm, pushing and surfacing these ideas on the platform for higher engagement. This frequent searching or commenting on this idea ends up making them appear more, confusing and inducing fear towards new and regular users.

Along with this factor, recently the app was sold for $14 billion dollars to a joint venture of American investors, including tech companies Oracle, the private equity firm Silver Lake, and the investment firm MGX.

Tiktok was originally owned by the Beijing-based technology company ByteDance; however, after U.S. officials started to fear that the Chinese government could access U.S. user data or influence content via the algorithm, leading to the 2024 Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. To avoid a nationwide ban, the sale was mandatory to keep tiktok in the U.S for its 200 million users.

From this shift, it led to the retraining of the algorithm on U.S. data, new content moderation policies, and technical issues during the transition. These factors are most likely what influenced the weird search recommendations of the search bar.

The next time you see weird, creepy search recommendations on your TikTok, just remember that they aren’t actually directed towards you, and shouldn’t be something to worry about, as it doesn’t impact your safety, and that it’s just the algorithm.