TikTok “Not – A Northeastern University study finds TikTok’s “Not Interested” button may only offer temporary relief. After users stop using it, the unwanted videos the feature flagged can resurface within minutes, with the effect varying widely by content type.
By the time you’ve finished tapping “Not Interested” and settling back into your scroll, the damage may already be delayed rather than undone. New research suggests TikTok’s control doesn’t keep unwanted content away for long.
The study, conducted by Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences, found that the feature provides only temporary relief. In the tests, flagged content reappeared within minutes after the accounts stopped using the button.
To probe how the feature behaves. the research team—led by Professor Piotr Sapiezynski and doctoral student Levi Kaplan—ran what they describe as a sock puppet audit on TikTok’s mobile app across three phases. They created automated accounts and trained each of them on specific topics: cooking, fitness, and sports betting. Each account watched over 200 videos per topic. After that. the accounts were divided into groups—one marked videos as “Not Interested. ” while the other simply swiped past the videos without using the button.
In the short term. the “Not Interested” button performed better than swiping past videos in most test runs across all three categories. But the results shifted once the accounts stopped pressing the button. The unwanted. flagged content returned quickly—especially for cooking videos. which appeared to rebound faster than the other baseline category results.
The researchers’ concern isn’t just that the feature fades. It’s that users can’t count on it to work in any predictable way. They say effectiveness varied significantly by topic, and there’s no reliable signal for when or why the button will stop helping.
Kaplan put it plainly: the button is still better than doing nothing. but TikTok users whose feeds remain dominated by content they’ve actively rejected are dealing with a documented platform behavior. not a random glitch. Sapiezynski added that the findings could matter for regulators in the European Union. Under the Digital Services Act. he said. offering a control feature that doesn’t perform as described may qualify as a dark pattern.
The study lands inside a broader push to test whether social media controls actually deliver the experience they advertise. The researchers have called on TikTok to make the “Not Interested” feature work consistently across all content categories—because if the effect is only temporary. the promise feels a lot less like control and a lot more like delay.
One thread connects the entire set of findings: short-term improvement didn’t hold up once the button stopped being used, and the timing of the return wasn’t uniform across topics.
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