4.5B Posts Scraped from TikTok
A technical guide details how a researcher scraped 4.5 billion posts from TikTok by bypassing public web endpoints and accessing the app's private HTTP+JSON API. The dataset includes creator profiles, videos, comments, and metadata, highlighting vulnerabilities in how the app handles data requests.
Why it matters
This raises significant privacy and security concerns regarding the mass collection of user data from social media platforms through undocumented internal APIs.
TikTok's Android app talks to a private HTTP+JSON API that is faster than the web endpoints and returns considerably more. This is a technical guide to reaching it: how devices are registered, how requests are signed, how the regional hosts are partitioned, and how the TLS handshake is fingerprinted. A system built on it collected 3.23 billion creator profiles, 5.94 billion videos and 2.8 billion comments in three weeks.
Free dataset. I uploaded 4.5 billion of those videos to Hugging Face: captions, view, like, comment and save counts, the sound, the country and the posting time. huggingface.co/datasets/kuben-developer/tiktok-videos-4b
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