TikTok is getting banned in the United States… or maybe its not?!?? Regardless, TikTok’s data export tool combined with yt-dlp makes it easy to download TikTok videos and metadata.

Here’s how I was able to download all the videos I liked as a TikTok user:

  1. I exported my TikTok data in JSON format.

  2. I extracted the liked video links into a .txt file using a snippet of Python: (See Jupyter notebook.)

import json
with open("user_data_tiktok.json") as infile, open("liked_videos.txt", "w") as outfile:
    user_data = json.load(infile)
    activity = user_data["Activity"]
    likes = activity["Like List"]["ItemFavoriteList"]
    for like in likes:
        outfile.write(like["link"] + "\n")
  1. I installed yt-dlp and ran it to download all videos listed in the liked_videos.txt file to the specified folder:
yt-dlp \
    -P ~/Downloads/liked_tiktok_videos \
    -a liked_videos.txt \
    -o "%(uploader)s_%(upload_date)s_%(id)s.%(ext)s" \
    --write-info-json

For each .mp4 video file, a corresponding .info.json file is created with the uploader’s display name and video description along with other metadata about the video file.

Expect unavailable videos

I was pretty shocked by the deletion rate of TikTok videos. Of my 3,837 TikTok likes, only 1,915 of those videos were available to download: that’s a 50.1% loss. Many American uploaders may have deleted their accounts or cleared out their older videos. However, this is an extremely non-random sample collected at a single moment in time, so it’s hard to speculate what the true loss rate is.

In general, some video deletions should be expected: people and platforms delete social media posts all the time. A 2010 study conducted by Zeynep Tufekci found that 81% of surveyed Facebook users (n=328) deleted info from their profile “because of a privacy or visibility concern”. A 2013 study of Twitter by Hany SalahEldeen and Michael Nelson found that 11% of tweets are deleted within a year of their creation. Brennan Schaffner et al. looked at account deletion on several platforms (including TikTok) in 2022, but didn’t attempt to estimate deletion rates by platform.

Like limits (Edit May 2026)

Three more notes:

  • Since I originally wrote this post, the format of the user data export has changed slightly.
  • If you have liked videos on private accounts or videos that can only be viewed while logged in (basically, videos that trip a “mature content” moderation filter), you can still access them by logging in on your browser and passing --cookies-from browser firefox to yt-dlp.
  • It appears there is a hard cap of 6,000 likes in the personal data export. You’ll only get your most recent 6,000 liked videos.