Just Another Hour on TikTok: Reverse-engineering unique identifiers to obtain a complete slice of TikTok

TikTok is now a massive platform, and has a deep impact on global events. But for all the preliminary studies done on it, there are still issues with determining fundamental characteristics of the platform. We develop a method to extract a representative sample from a specific time range on TikTok, and use it to collect >99% of posts from a full hour on the platform, alongside a dataset of >99% of posts from a single minute from each hour of a day. Through this, we obtain post metadata, video media data, and comments from a close to complete slice of TikTok. Using this dataset, we report the critical statistics of the platform, notably estimating a total of 269 million posts produced on the day we looked at on TikTok, that 18% of videos on the platform feature children, and that ~176 years of videos are uploaded every day.