Some employees have argued political posts are good for business, and urged the company to loosen its political ads ban. Others worry politics could poison TikTok’s magic.
By Emily Baker-White, Forbes Staff
Over a weekend this past June, the team of TikTok staffers tasked with preventing 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 attempted to ban TikTok in 2020 — announcing he now opposed a ban on the platform. The video was accompanied by a one-word message, written in all caps: “YEP…”
The message inspired a flurry of discussion across the team and on the anonymous social networking app Blind, where TikTok staffers wondered just what, if anything, it meant and what it said about the company’s longstanding ban on political ads. Was this executive, a longtime ByteDance China employee now living in Singapore, expressing a preference for Trump because of his sudden opposition to a TikTok ban? Or was he simply flagging the news to his American staff?
Just hours after the message was sent, it was deleted, a reminder of a sticky tension for TikTok. For years, a debate has raged inside the company about how it should handle political discourse on its platform, which now boasts more U.S. users than people who voted in the 2020 presidential election. The issue has been especially sensitive as the company has faced multiple legislative inquiries, a federal criminal investigation, lawsuits from numerous state attorneys general, and the passage of a new law that requires its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app or see it banned.
According to six people with knowledge of the efforts, the company has considered changes to how it handles both “organic” political posts and political ads.
One proposal brought to the group earlier this year would have the company partner with select “authoritative” news publications to boost the publications’ distribution.
A working group of senior employees known as Project Core has met 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 TikTok is — at its “core” — a place for lighthearted videos, rather than shitposting or doomscrolling. Project Core considered research on what leads to “toxicity” on the platform, as well as proposals about how TikTok should handle “hard” news and politics in TikTok’s For You feed.
One proposal brought to the group earlier this year would have the company partner with select “authoritative” news publications to boost the publications’ distribution on the platform. Opponents of the proposal were concerned about how partners would be selected, and some suggested that the company conduct a case study into 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 answer questions about whether the company has begun upranking certain news publications it has decided are authoritative.
On the ads side, some leaders — including the monetization integrity executive who sent the Trump message — have argued that relaxing the platform’s ban on political advertising would be an easy source of revenue growth for the company.
Just because the platform doesn’t accept money for political ads doesn’t mean TikTok users don’t see them.
Members of TikTok’s monetization integrity team — the team tasked with enforcing its advertising rules — report to both the company’s head of Global Business Solutions (who runs the company’s ad sales) and its head of Trust & Safety. Some employees view the department’s relationship with their ad sales colleagues as a conflict of interest: ad sales teams are supposed to bring in revenue for the company, while monetization integrity teams review ads under the company’s policies and remove the ones that shouldn’t be there, which reduces the platform’s total number of ads and ad spend.
So far, proponents of changing TikTok’s prohibition on political ads have not won out. The platform still prohibits people from placing paid political ads on its platform as it has since 2019, spokesperson Ben Rathe told Forbes. But just because the platform doesn’t accept money for political ads doesn’t mean TikTok users don’t see them: TikTok accounts run by candidates, parties, and advocacy groups routinely post short videos on the platform that are running as ads on TV and other social platforms. The posts aren’t posted as ads on TikTok — the candidates, campaigns, and advocates aren’t paying TikTok for their distribution; instead, the posts are so-called “organic,” and their reach is determined by engagement and other factors considered by the opaque TikTok algorithm.
People also can, in some cases, still pay TikTok to run ads about politically sensitive topics. The platform bans ads that tell people to support a specific candidate, party, or platform, but does not prohibit those arguing, for example, that abortion is murder, grocery prices are too high, or sanctuary cities are riddled with crime — so long as they do not violate the company’s other policies, like those prohibiting discrimination, harassment, and bullying.
In 2024, the company also changed its approach to ads depicting victims of war. While it had previously banned such imagery in ads, it relaxed its policies to allow for humanitarian campaigns. "Advocating for stopping wars and armed conflict, and raising awareness of war victims, may be allowed as long as the ad content does not violate our ad policies, including depictions of real war scenes," its policies now say.
Hundreds of ads about the Israel-Palestine conflict have run on TikTok, many portraying devastation and injured children in Gaza. Although the ads do not mention U.S. politics, it is not hard to imagine how they might sway U.S. voters, especially in Muslim diaspora communities like Dearborn, Michigan, where ads about the war have been aggressively targeted to voters.
Unlike its main U.S. competitors, Meta and Google, TikTok does not have a public ad library showing which ads it has run in the United States and how they were targeted. The company does have an ad library for European markets, where it is required under law. But while Meta and Google have voluntarily chosen to reveal who advertises about politics and social issues in the United States and how much they spend, TikTok has kept this information secret. Nonetheless, recent tests by researchers show that the company has let openly political ads run on its platform, despite his prohibition on them.
TikTok has a complicated history with political content. In 2019, the company came under fire for censoring posts about protests in Hong Kong and other topics with sensitivity to the Chinese government. It subsequently changed its content policies and does not censor such topics today. In 2022, Forbes revealed that the Chinese government had run a campaign on the platform targeting U.S. lawmakers from both political parties in the lead-up to the U.S. midterm elections. During the time that campaign was active, the company’s top lobbyist, Michael Beckerman, told CNN’s Brian Stelter that TikTok was “not the go-to place for politics.” When Stelter asked whether TikTok might “influence Americans’ commercial, cultural, or political behavior,” Beckerman responded: “Yeah, I just don’t see that.”
By March 2024, Beckerman appeared to have changed his tune. In response to the introduction of a new bill targeting TikTok in Congress — the bill that would ultimately become the law that the company is now fighting — his public policy team devised a set of pop-ups that would appear when TikTok users opened their phones, prompting them to call their congressperson or senator to oppose the bill. Soon, lawmakers’ offices were flooded with calls, including some from children and people threatening to harm themselves or others if the bill passed.
The effort backfired, and the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act passed in April — before Trump, in a stunning reversal, stated that he would not follow through with the ban if he were elected president again.
Despite Trump’s opposition to the law, it’s not clear that he could stop it from going into effect. Unless a court invalidates the law, or stays it pending further proceedings, Apple and Google will be required to remove the apps from their app stores in January or begin accruing fines. While a Trump Attorney General could decide not to enforce the fines, a subsequent administration could still choose to do so, by which point the American tech giants might owe penalties high into the billions.
