Is it manually curated? The article talks about how their algorithms are part of their core success.

TouTiao was about the feed and the algorithm from the beginning. The first time a user opened TouTiao, the news might be rather generic, but every scroll, every linger over a story, every click, was fed into a feedback loop that refined what it was the user saw.

Meanwhile all of that data fed back into TouTiao’s larger machine learning processes, which effectively ran billions of A/B tests a day on content of all types, cross-referenced against all of the user data it could collect. Soon the app was indispensable to its users, able to anticipate the news they cared about with nary a friend recommendation in sight.

Probably a mix of manual and automated. I know where was a big stink semi-recently about them manually removing content from "ugly" and "poor" people.

I guess no way to be 100% sure of the validity of the claims, but here is one article reporting on it: https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...

I haven't verified this but supposedly this is now done automatically with machine learning: https://www.tiktokbeautiful.com/

I thought so too, but if the article is to be believed it's algorithmic / AI (with at the very least Chinese censors doing /some/ degree of curation).

I think it's both. In my experience algorithms can do a great job of matching good user generated content to people who will appreciate it, after all the trash has been filtered out. I still haven't seen a viable way to keep good content and remove bad without human reviewers in the loop. Trying to fight bad UGC with algorithms alone appears to be an AI complete problem, because there are humans actively learning and working around your defenses on the other side.