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If you’ve been tapping TikTok‘s “Not Interested” button hoping to reclaim your feed, new research suggests the effort has a shorter shelf life than the platform implies. A study from Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences found that the feature provides only temporary relief, with unwanted content resurfacing within minutes after a user stops using it.
How the researchers tested it
The team, led by Professor Piotr Sapiezynski and doctoral student Levi Kaplan, ran a sock puppet audit on TikTok’s mobile app across three phases. They created automated accounts and trained each on cooking, fitness, or sports betting by having them watch over 200 videos on each topic. The accounts were then split into groups: one marked videos as “Not Interested,” and the other simply swiped past them.
In the short term, the button worked better than swiping in the majority of test runs across all three categories. But the long-term results told a different story. Once the accounts stopped pressing the button, the flagged content returned quickly, with cooking videos, the study’s baseline category, rebounding especially fast.
The bigger concern
The researchers say the core problem is consistency. The button’s effectiveness varied significantly by topic, and users had no reliable way to predict when or why it would stop working. Kaplan noted that while the button is still better than doing nothing, TikTok users who find their feeds still dominated by content they’ve actively rejected are experiencing a documented platform behavior, not a glitch. Sapiezynski said the findings could be relevant for regulators in the European Union, where offering a control feature that doesn’t perform as described may qualify as a dark pattern under the Digital Services Act.
The study adds to a growing body of research questioning whether social media platforms’ user-facing controls deliver what they promise. The researchers have called on TikTok to make the feature work consistently across all content categories.
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