TikTok response to the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, 23 March 2023:

"TikTok's Focused View product does not use emotion recognition techniques.

Focused View is a tool available for advertisers to serve their ads to people more likely to actively engage with an ad. With Focused View, brands only pay when users have watched an ad for at least 6 seconds or when they interacted with the ad within the first 6 seconds (whichever comes first).

As such, Focused View processes data about how users interact with ad videos on TikTok, in particular (i) the length of time that an ad video appears on the screen and (ii) video interactions such as shares and clicks, to measure a user's active engagement with the ad. This is all described in our advertiser-facing materials, for example as seen on our Business Help Center (https://ads.tiktok.com/help/article/focused-view-optimization-updates-to-video-view-objective?redirected=1). Optimising ads in this way is a well-established industry practice, consistent with our Privacy Policy."