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After a month, more than three-quarters of the users who had typically spent roughly 30 minutes per day on TikTok were now spending nearly twice that much time on the app, on average.
A few months later, these users’ daily watch times reached 70 minutes, on average. For some, their time spent scrolling every day more than tripled or quadrupled.
Jon Freilich, a 51-year-old operations manager in California, described his TikTok behavior as an addiction.
“I’ve never smoked or used drugs, so I don’t know what chemical addiction feels like, but I feel like I’m addicted to TikTok,” said Freilich, whose daily watch time on the app increased by more than 50 percent last year. “There are times when I know I should stop scrolling and get work done or go to sleep, but it’s so hard to stop, knowing the next swipe might bring me to a truly interesting video.”
That’s how TikTok draws people in, with an algorithm that serves up an endless stream of hyper-personalized content to users such as Freilich.
But TikTok is massive, fragmented and opaque: Millions of Americans…
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