Safety Center

Making your feed For You

Updated: June 3, 2025

Making your feed For You

The For You feed is the heart of the TikTok experience. It's where viewers can discover new interests and learn more about the topics they love, and where creators find their audience and build thriving communities.

Just as no two people are the same, no two For You feeds are the same. In this guide, you can learn more about how to shape your ideal For You feed, including how it works, how we work to keep it safe, as well as features and tips you can use to truly make your feed your own.

How does the For You feed work?

Most platforms have feeds where they show you new content selected by a recommendation system or an algorithm. Recommendation systems use technology to find, sort, and show content you may enjoy.

What makes TikTok's For You feed special is that it's focused on helping you discover new topics and creators, beyond the ones you already know. To do that, it learns from your previous interactions with content, filters out posts that may not be appropriate, and works to predict new content or creators you'll also enjoy.

How does it do that? It can feel like magic, but it's more like math. By understanding the kinds of content you previously enjoyed, our recommendation system can predict which posts you're most likely to enjoy in the future. Below are some of the factors that shape which content makes it to your feed.

Learning about what you like

When you first create a TikTok account, our recommendation system has very basic information about your preferences, such as your country, language, and the age you provided. We'll also ask you to select a few general topics to give our systems an early hint.

That's helpful, but not really a personalized experience—yet. As you watch more content and give our system more information about what you enjoy, it can make better predictions. For example, it may learn from:

Whether you liked, shared, favorited, or commented on a post
How long you watched a video for, and whether you finished it or moved on to another before it's complete
Who you follow on TikTok
Topics you recently searched for
The content that others who share your interests also enjoyed

Learn more about our recommendation system in our Help Center.

Prioritizing quality content

As our recommendation algorithm learns from what you enjoy, it works to identify high quality, relevant content and show it to you in an order that feels fresh and interesting. To do that, it considers additional factors and follows guidelines like:

Avoiding repetitive recommendations, such as showing multiple similar posts in a row
Promoting local creators
Prioritizing recent content over older content
Assessing factors like the length of the post, the time it was posted, and which sounds were used

Filtering out content that may not be suitable for you

To help you discover and explore TikTok in a safer way, we apply additional safeguards before content makes it to your feed:

Our For You feed eligibility rules prohibit the algorithm from recommending content that, while allowed on TikTok, may not be appropriate for everyone. Learn more about our For You feed eligibility standards in our Community Guidelines.
We double-check posts that are rising in popularity to help ensure they're suitable for everyone. This is an additional measure on top of the safety moderation that already happens on all TikTok content.
Our For You feed rules interrupt frequent recommendations of certain content that may be fine when seen occasionally, but can become problematic if seen too often, such as extreme fitness-related content.
Through Content Levels, we also work to prevent content with mature or complex themes from reaching young people.

How can I shape my For You feed?

Any time you scroll through TikTok, you're shaping your For You feed just by watching the content you enjoy, and skipping past content you don't. To further shape your For You feed, you can also use popular TikTok features to enhance your experience:

Favorite or like content: If you really enjoy a post, add it to your Favorites or like it to let our recommendation system know you want to see more of that content.
Follow creators: Following your favorite creators gives our system more context to predict other creators or content you may enjoy.
Select "Not interested" on content: If you see content you're not interested in, press and hold the post, then tap Not interested to let your algorithm know.
Search: When you search for topics, you provide strong indicators around which content you want to discover.

In your content preference settings, we offer a range of tools that empower you to further personalize your feed:

Filter keywords: Helps reduce how much content you see related to keywords that you've specified.
Restricted Mode: Turn on Restricted Mode to limit exposure to content that may not be comfortable for everyone.
Manage topics: Choose to see more or less content about specific topics, and update these preferences at any time.
Refresh your For You feed: View a fresh feed as if you've just signed up for TikTok, and tailor it by engaging with a wide range of popular and trending content.
Muted accounts: Mute accounts that you want to see less of, including their posts.

Keep in mind that if you're a parent or guardian, you can manage many of these features alongside your teen's account with Family Pairing. Visit our Guardian's Guide for more information.