Some employees argued that political posts are good for business and called on the company to ease its ban on political advertising. Some worry that politics could poison TikTok’s magic.
Emily Baker-White, Forbes Staff
One weekend this June, a team of TikTok staff tasked with stopping political ads from running on the app received a strange message from their boss. It was a video in which former President Donald Trump, who first tried to ban TikTok in 2020, said he now opposes banning the platform. The video was accompanied by a one-word message written in all caps: “YEP…”
The message sparked heated debate within the team and on the anonymous social networking app Blind, with TikTok staff wondering what it all meant and what it said about the company’s long-standing ban on political ads. Ta. Did the long-time ByteDance China executive, who now lives in Singapore, express favoritism for Trump after the president suddenly opposed the TikTok ban? Or did he simply report the news to his American staff?
The message was deleted just hours after it was sent, but it was a reminder of the tension on TikTok. Debate has raged internally for years over how to handle political discussion on the company’s platform, which currently has more U.S. users than voted in the 2020 presidential election. I’m holding it. The issue is particularly sensitive as the company faces multiple legislative investigations, a federal criminal investigation, lawsuits from numerous state attorneys general, and the passage of a new law that would require Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell or view the app. This has become a problem. Forbidden.
The company is considering changes to how it handles both “organic” political posts and political ads, according to six people familiar with the effort.
One of the proposals brought to the group earlier this year was for the company to partner with select “authoritative” news publications to boost publication distribution.
A working group of senior employees known as Project Core has been meeting regularly for several years to consider the role of potentially polarizing discourse on the TikTok platform. The group’s name was a nod to the idea that, at its “core,” TikTok is a place for posting light-hearted videos, not shitposts and doomscrolling. Project Core considered research into what constitutes “toxicity” on the platform and suggestions for how TikTok should handle “harsh” news and politics on TikTok’s For You feed.
One of the proposals submitted to the group earlier this year was for the company to partner with select “authoritative” news publications to facilitate distribution of publications on the platform. Opponents of the proposal were concerned about how partners would be chosen, with some suggesting a case study on Facebook’s history of problems with political publishers before moving forward with the plan. (Disclosure: In a past life, I held content policy positions at Facebook and Spotify.)
TikTok declined to comment on Project Core, and also declined to answer questions about whether it has started ranking certain news publications it deems authoritative.
On the advertising side, some leaders, including the Monetization Integrity executive who delivered President Trump’s message, have argued that relaxing the platform’s ban on political ads would be an easy source of revenue for the company. There is.
Just because the platform doesn’t accept money for political ads doesn’t mean TikTok users won’t see political ads.
Members of TikTok’s Monetization Integrity Team (the team tasked with enforcing advertising rules) include both the company’s Head of Global Business Solutions (who handles the company’s ad sales) and Head of Trust & Safety. Reports directly to Some employees view the department’s relationship with their advertising sales colleagues as a conflict of interest. The ad sales team is supposed to bring in revenue for the company, while the monetization integrity team reviews ads based on company policy and removes ads that shouldn’t exist. This reduces the total number of ads and advertising costs on the platform.
So far, proponents of changing TikTok’s ban on political advertising have not won. The platform still prohibits paid political ads from running on its platform since 2019, spokesperson Ben Raate told Forbes. But just because the platform doesn’t accept money for political ads doesn’t mean TikTok users won’t see them. TikTok accounts run by candidates, political parties and advocacy groups regularly post short videos to the platform and run as ads on television. and other social platforms. Posts are not posted as advertisements on TikTok. Candidates, campaigns, and supporters do not pay distribution fees to TikTok. Instead, posts are so-called “organic,” and their reach is determined by engagement and other factors considered by the opaque TikTok algorithm.
In some cases, you can also pay TikTok to run ads on politically sensitive topics. The platform prohibits ads that encourage people to support a particular candidate, party, or platform, such as abortion is murder, food prices are too high, and sanctuary cities are full of crime. Advertisements that claim such things are not prohibited. Does not violate any other Company policies, including those prohibiting discrimination, harassment, or bullying.
In 2024, the company also changed its approach to ads depicting victims of war. The government had previously banned the use of such images in advertising, but has now relaxed its policy to allow humanitarian campaigns. The policy states: “Advocating an end to war and armed conflict and raising awareness of war victims may be allowed as long as the advertising content does not violate our advertising policies, such as depicting actual war scenes.” It is stipulated that there is a gender.
TikTok has hundreds of ads about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, many of which depict devastation in Gaza and injured children. Although the ads do not mention U.S. politics, there are concerns about how they might sway U.S. voters, as war ads actively target voters, especially in Muslim diaspora communities like Dearborn, Michigan. It’s not hard to imagine what they would do.
Unlike its main U.S. competitors Meta and Google, TikTok doesn’t have a public ad library that shows which ads it runs in the U.S. and how they’re targeted. The company has an advertising library for the European market, which is required by law. But while Meta and Google chose to voluntarily reveal who advertises on U.S. politics and social issues and how much they spend, TikTok kept this information secret. Nevertheless, recent tests by researchers found that despite his ban, the company was allowing openly political ads to run on its platform.
TikTok has a complicated history with political content. The company came under fire in 2019 for censoring posts about the Hong Kong protests and other topics sensitive to the Chinese government. We have since changed our content policy and now no longer censor such topics. In 2022, Forbes revealed that the Chinese government was running a campaign on the platform targeting U.S. lawmakers from both political parties in the run-up to the U.S. midterm elections. At the height of the campaign, the company’s top lobbyist, Michael Beckerman, told CNN’s Brian Stelter that TikTok “is not a place where politics can be relied upon.” When Stelter asked if TikTok could “influence the commercial, cultural, and political behavior of Americans,” Beckerman replied, “Well, I don’t know about that.” I answered.
By March 2024, Beckerman appears to have changed his tune. Now that a new bill targeting TikTok has been introduced in Congress, which will ultimately become the law the company is currently fighting, his public policy team says TikTok users will not be able to use their phones. I devised a series of pop-ups that appear when opened. He urged them to call their representatives or senators to oppose the bill. Soon, the lawmaker’s office was flooded with calls, some from children and others threatening to harm themselves or others if the bill passed.
The effort backfired, and the Protecting Americans from Regulatory Applications by Foreign Enemies Act was passed in April, but then, in a stunning reversal, President Trump announced that if he were elected president again, he would be subject to the ban. said he would not comply.
Despite President Trump’s opposition to the law, it is unclear whether he will be able to block its implementation. Unless a court strikes down the law or suspends further litigation, Apple and Google will have to remove the app from their app stores or start collecting fines in January. Attorney General Trump may decide not to enforce the fine, but it is also possible that a subsequent administration will choose not to enforce the fine, by which point the US tech giants will have lost billions of dollars. You may incur increasing fines.
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