Today's top TikTok is...

Congress cares about TikTok. And they should. The app is not all song and dance. Though TikTok wants you think otherwise, it’s fast becoming a major news source for Americans.

Given the billions of hours Americans are spending consuming news in the app, one might wonder what exactly they are watching.

Or to put it another way: what are the most viewed videos for any given day, week or month?

The answer to that question: no one knows.

Because as far as I know — and I’ve also asked several experts (see Notes below) — there is no regular, public resource showing the most viewed videos on TikTok, for any given time period.

Not TikTok itself, with its bafflingly opaque search feature that doesn’t allow sorting by view count.

Not the official TikTok Research API, which imposes a limit of 1,000 requests a day even to the vetted researchers who have to sign a ‘minefield’ terms of service to access it.

Not any third party resource, such as a TikTok equivalent to AlgoTransparency’s YouTube recommendations data.

What’s particularly bizarre is that this missing data is by definition extremely public. The most viewed videos are very much out there, being watched by tens of millions of people every day.

But the data exists in siloes of different users’ TikTok apps, with no way to see across. I might watch one or two >50m videos on a typical day in the app, but this doesn’t help me see all the videos that are getting to this level.

And to try and pull this data together would be extremely hard, as I’ll explore in a follow up piece.

TikTok themselves have this data, of course. Big tech companies like Google, which crawl the internet, could probably create it. And social monitoring companies like Tubular Labs have databases of billions of TikTok videos which they charge $1000s per month for access to, so they have at least some pieces of the missing data puzzle.

But policy-makers, journalists, civil society? The world at large? Nope.

Policy-makers around the world are hauling TikTok executives in for questioning about their app. Journalists are writing about the effect of TikTok’s spread on society, and civil society are concerned about how it spreads fake news, hate speech, and content that harms kids&