Ah, I see. That I don’t know, I have successfully avoided tiktok like the plague (because I know my brain would just overdose on the dopamine). But I suspect that if that were how they run things, we’d see a lot more complaints like yours. Also, such blunt mechanisms tend to leak and be reported on, especially when a service comes under close scrutiny as tiktok has. So just based on my experience with how the internet works, I doubt it.

Edit: I may have made some wrong assumptions when I wrote this, idk.