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.