Someone Scraped 5.6 Billion TikTok Videos and Put the Data on Hugging Face for Free

What happened

Someone Scraped 5.6 Billion TikTok Videos and Put the Data on Hugging Face for Free, according to Decrypt. A developer posted metadata for about 5.6 billion public TikTok videos, scraped through the app's private API (the interface one piece of software uses to talk to another) in a way TikTok's terms prohibit. The free dataset also doubles as a storefront. ByteDance is an Internet company based in Beijing, and its products and services include TikTok.

Decrypt News Technology Someone Scraped 5.6 Billion TikTok Videos and Put the Data on Hugging Face for Free A developer posted metadata for about 5.6 billion public TikTok videos, scraped through the app's private API in a way TikTok's terms prohibit. In brief A developer who goes by hashfunction posted metadata for about 5.6 billion public TikTok videos on Hugging Face, covering July 2014 through October 2026, free under a non-commercial license.

TikTok's terms bar automated scraping without written approval, and the developer's own write-up says the data came from TikTok's private mobile API with no login. The dataset card routes commercial use, creator profiles and daily updates to datasocial.ai, which also sells the scraper's source code for $1,699. A developer who goes by hashfunction has posted metadata for about 5.6 billion public TikTok videos on the open-source AI repository Hugging Face, free to download.