Archiving TikTok

Overview

TikTok is social media platform for creating and sharing short-form videos. Archive-It partners may archive TikTok posts, accounts, topic feeds, and their associated media like any other seed site. For best results, we recommend collecting with the Brozzler capture technology and the seed formats described below.

Known issues

Social media platforms like TikTok can be difficult to archive. Currently, TikTok has the following issues which we continue to actively monitor:

• ⚠️ TikTok is blocking some recent captures of account feeds and often the metadata used by Archive-It Wayback to replay videos in page. Video files can still be captured from individual video pages.

You can find a full list of known issues for archiving various platforms on our Status of monitored platforms page. 

On this page: 

• How to select and format your TikTok seeds
• Scoping TikTok seeds
• Running your crawl
• What to expect from your TikTok archives

How to select and format your TikTok seeds

When adding new TikTok seeds to your collection, apply the Standard seed type and format the seed URL like the following, replacing only the unique username, video ID string, or tag where applicable:

• Post: https://www.tiktok.com/@museumofneonart/video/7010044943708327173 
• Account: https://www.tiktok.com/@pbsnature/ 
• Tag: https://www.tiktok.com/tag/cartok/ 

Scoping TikTok seeds

New TikTok seeds will have default scoping rules applied to them at the seed level when they are added to a collection. To learn more, including how you can add the default scoping rules to existing seeds, see:Sites with automated scoping rules.

Default scoping for TikTok seeds

All TikTok seeds added on or after October 1, 2021, will have the following scoping rules applied to them at the seed level, in order to ensure that the intended video posts are captured and endless other “recommended” video posts are not:

• Ignore Robots.txt
• Block URL if it matches the regular expression: ^https?://([^.]*\.)*tiktokcdn\.com/[^.]*video\/tos\/.*$
• Block URL if it contains the text: byteoversea.com
• Block URL if it contains the text: tiktok.com/acrawler/
• Block URL if it contains the text: tiktok.com/api/policy/
• Block URL if it contains the text: tiktok.com/api/recommend/
• Block URL if it contains the text: tiktok.com/api/share/
• Block URL if it contains the text: tiktok.com/node/share/discover

To limit the scope of TikTok seeds added before October 2021, you may apply the above scope adjustment manually and/or in bulk.

Default scoping will collect all of the video posts associated with an account’s or tag’s seed URL. To archive only the homepage for an account profile or a trending topic, use the One Page seed type.

Running your crawl

For best result, crawl TikTok seeds using Brozzler. 

What to expect from your TikTok archives

Limitations

Archive-It Wayback cannot yet replay scrolling feeds infinitely for longer TikTok account profile or tag feeds.

Pages with multiple TikTok videos will only be able to replay the first video in Wayback. Videos after the first may be able to replay by opening them in new browser tabs.