Like other social media, TikTok is embracing its use as a search engine, developing search products to steer users to produce searchable content and engage in content discovery. Their recently developed product search recommendations are preformulated search queries recommended to users on videos. However, TikTok provides limited transparency about how search recommendations are generated and moderated, despite requirements under regulatory frameworks like the European Union's Digital Services Act. By suggesting that the platform simply aggregates comments and common searches linked to videos, it sidesteps responsibility and issues that arise from contextually problematic recommendations, reigniting long-standing concerns about platform liability and moderation. This position paper addresses the novelty of search recommendations on TikTok by highlighting the challenges that this feature poses for platform governance and offering a computational research agenda, drawing on preliminary qualitative analysis. It sets out the need for transparency in platform documentation, data access and research to study search recommendations.

翻译：与其他社交媒体平台类似，TikTok正日益将自身定位为搜索引擎，开发搜索类产品以引导用户创作可搜索内容并参与内容发现。其最新推出的产品“搜索推荐”功能，是在视频中向用户推荐预先设定的搜索查询词。然而，尽管欧盟《数字服务法案》等监管框架对此有明确要求，TikTok在搜索推荐的生成与审核机制方面仍缺乏透明度。该平台声称其仅聚合与视频相关的评论及常见搜索，借此规避责任，并回避了因上下文不当推荐引发的问题，从而重新点燃了长期以来关于平台责任与内容审核的争议。本立场论文聚焦TikTok搜索推荐的新颖性，通过强调该功能对平台治理构成的挑战，并在初步定性分析基础上提出计算研究议程。论文明确了平台文档公开透明、数据获取及开展搜索推荐相关研究的必要性。