Some employees argued that political contributions were good for business and called on the corporate to loosen up its ban on political promoting. Others worry that politics could poison TikTok’s magic.
From Emily Baker WhiteForbes contributor
One weekend last June, the team of TikTok employees tasked with stopping political ads from running on the app received an odd message from their boss. It was a video of former President Donald Trump – who first tried to ban TikTok in 2020 – wherein he announced that he now opposed a ban on the platform. The video was accompanied by a one-word message written in all caps: “YEP…”
The news sparked a heated discussion across the team and on the anonymous social networking app Blind, where TikTok employees wondered what, if anything, it meant and what it said concerning the company’s longstanding ban on political promoting. Did this executive, a long-time ByteDance China worker now living in Singapore, express a preference for Trump because he suddenly opposed a TikTok ban? Or did he simply break the news to his American employees?
Just hours after the message was sent, it was deleted, a reminder of the continuing tension for TikTok. For years, a debate has raged inside the company about how one can handle political discourse on its platform, which now has more U.S. users than individuals who voted within the 2020 presidential election. The issue was particularly sensitive as the corporate faced multiple legislative investigations, a federal criminal investigation, lawsuits from quite a few state attorneys general and the passage of a brand new law requiring its Chinese parent company ByteDance to ban sales or viewing of the app.
The company has been considering changes to the best way it handles each “organic” political posts and political ads, in response to six individuals with knowledge of the trouble.
A proposal presented to the group earlier this yr would see the corporate work with select “authoritative” news publications to extend the publications’ distribution.
A working group of senior staff called Project Core has been meeting repeatedly for several years to think about the role of a potentially polarizing discourse on the TikTok platform. The group’s name was a nod to the concept that TikTok, at its “core,” is a spot for lighthearted videos and never shitposting or doomscrolling. Project Core considered research into what results in “toxicity” on the platform, in addition to suggestions for the way TikTok should handle “tough” news and politics within the TikTok For You feed.
A proposal presented to the group earlier this yr would see the corporate work with select “authoritative” news publications to extend the distribution of publications on the platform. Opponents of the proposal were concerned about how partners could be chosen, and a few suggested that the corporate conduct a case study on Facebook’s troubled history with political publishers before moving forward. (Disclosure: In a previous life I held content policy positions for Facebook and Spotify.)
TikTok declined to comment on Project Core and declined to reply questions on whether the corporate has begun upgrading certain news publications it deems authoritative.
On the promoting front, some executives — including the monetization integrity manager who delivered the Trump message — have argued that relaxing the platform’s ban on political promoting could be a straightforward income growth for the corporate.
Just since the platform doesn’t accept money for political ads doesn’t suggest TikTok users don’t see them.
Members of TikTok’s monetization integrity team — the team tasked with enforcing its promoting rules — report back to each the corporate’s head of world business solutions (who leads the corporate’s ad sales) and its head of trust and safety. Some employees view the department’s relationship with its ad sales colleagues as a conflict of interest: ad sales teams are purported to generate revenue for the corporate, while monetization integrity teams review ads in response to company policy and take away people who should not be there, thereby reducing the platform’s overall ad count and ad spend be reduced.
So far, proponents of fixing the TikTok ban on political promoting have been unable to get their way. The platform continues to ban people from placing paid political promoting on its platform, because it has done since 2019, spokesman Ben Rathe said Forbes. But simply because the platform doesn’t accept money for political promoting doesn’t suggest TikTok users don’t see them: TikTok accounts of candidates, parties and interest groups repeatedly post short videos on the platform, that are shown as advertisements on television and others social platforms. The contributions won’t be published as promoting on TikTok – the candidates, campaigns and advocates don’t pay TikTok for his or her distribution; Instead, the posts are so-called “organic” posts and their reach is set by engagement and other aspects taken under consideration by TikTok’s opaque algorithm.
In some cases, people can still pay TikTok to run ads about politically sensitive topics. The platform bans ads that urge people to support a selected candidate, party or platform, but doesn’t ban people who argue, for instance, that abortion is murder, food prices are too high or sanctuary cities are crime-ridden – so long as They don’t violate the corporate’s other policies, similar to those prohibiting discrimination, harassment and bullying.
In 2024, the corporate also modified its approach to ads depicting war victims. While previously such images were banned in advertisements, the rules have been relaxed to permit humanitarian campaigns. “Advocating to end wars and armed conflicts and raising awareness of victims of war may be permitted as long as the advertising content does not violate our advertising guidelines, including depicting real scenes of war,” the rules now state.
Hundreds of ads related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ran on TikTok, lots of which depicted the devastation and injured children within the Gaza Strip. Although the ads don’t mention U.S. politics, it isn’t hard to assume how they may influence U.S. voters, particularly in Muslim diaspora communities like Dearborn, Michigan, where ads concerning the war have been run aggressively targeted to the voters.
Unlike its foremost competitors within the US, Meta and Google, TikTok doesn’t have a public promoting library that shows which ads the corporate has served within the US and the way they were targeted. The company has an promoting library for European markets where required by law. But while Meta and Google have voluntarily chosen to reveal who advertises on politics and social issues within the United States and the way much they spend on them, TikTok has kept this information private. Nonetheless, current tests by researchers show that the corporate ran overtly political ads on its platform despite its ban.
TikTok has an advanced history with political content. In 2019, the corporate got here under criticism Censorship of posts about protests in Hong Kong and other problems with concern to the Chinese government. It subsequently modified its content policies and not censors such topics today. In 2022 Forbes revealed that the Chinese government had run a campaign on the platform within the run-up to the U.S. midterm elections, targeting U.S. lawmakers from each political parties. While this campaign was lively, the corporate’s top lobbyist, Michael Beckerman, said CNN’s Brian Stelter that TikTok is “not the place to go for politics”. When Stelter asked whether TikTok could “influence the commercial, cultural or political behavior of Americans,” Beckerman replied, “Yeah, I just don’t see that.”
In March 2024, Beckerman appeared to have modified his tune. In response to the introduction of a brand new anti-TikTok bill in Congress – the bill that may ultimately grow to be the law the corporate is now fighting – its public policy team developed a series of pop-ups that may appear when TikTok -Users opened their phones. which led them to call their congressman or senator to protest the bill. Soon, lawmakers’ offices were flooded with calls, including some from children and folks threatening to harm themselves or others if the law passed.
The effort backfired, and in April the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act was passed — before Trump, in a surprising about-face, said he wouldn’t implement the ban if elected president again.
Despite Trump’s opposition to the law, it will not be clear whether he could prevent it from taking effect. Unless a court invalidates the law or suspends it pending further proceedings, Apple and Google could have to remove the apps from their app stores in January or face fines. While a Trump attorney general could determine to not implement the fines, a subsequent administration could still decide to achieve this, leaving America’s tech giants owing billions of dollars in penalties.
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