Next year’s US presidential election promises to be a bumper pay-day for ad-supported digital services of all kinds, music included. Certainly Pandora and Spotify will be angling for the audio budgets of the candidates and the activist groups supporting them in the US. TikTok? Not so much. Well, not at all, in fact.
“We have chosen not to allow political ads on TikTok,” blogged the app’s VP of global business solutions Blake Chandlee yesterday. “Any paid ads that come into the community need to fit the standards for our platform, and the nature of paid political ads is not something we believe fits the TikTok platform experience. To that end, we will not allow paid ads that promote or oppose a candidate, current leader, political party or group, or issue at the federal, state, or local level – including election-related ads, advocacy ads, or issue ads.”
It’s still early days for TikTok’s advertising business, but Bytedance’s app is setting out its stall in regards to politics. The news follows recent discussion in the media about TikTok’s separate (and historical, so it claims) content policies, which included censorship of certain kinds of political content.
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