Teen-focused social app TikTok bans political advertising

TikTok, a video selfie app popular with teenagers, has sensibly decided political advertising doesn’t fit in with its vibe.

For those unfamiliar with it, TikTok is the latest big thing in social media for kids, teens and, presumably, anyone reluctant to move on from that phase. It enables people to make and publish short video clips of themselves on their phones and even splice in other media. It comes over as the best app yet to facilitate the kind of narcissism enabled by the social media connected camera phone.

TikTok’s most popular users seem to be teens doing musical performances or just generally talking to the camera, so it seems to reside somewhere in between Instagram and YouTube. But just as importantly it’s relatively new and unsullied by grownups, so it could well be increasingly supplanting its competitors in the teen market.

Conscious of its user demographic, TikTok is sensibly careful about its commercial deals. The PR consequences of serving ‘inappropriate’ content to kids would be severe and not worth the revenue. The latest such decision has been made regarding political advertising, which everyone knows is often the most bad-faith, dishonest, unpleasant propaganda and totally incongruous in an environment fills with kids just trying to have a bit of attention-seeking fun.

“…our primary focus is on creating an entertaining, genuine experience for our community,” said Blake Chandlee, VP of Global Business Solutions at TikTok, in a recent blog post. “While we explore ways to provide value to brands, we’re intent on always staying true to why users uniquely love the TikTok platform itself: for the app’s light-hearted and irreverent feeling that makes it such a fun place to spend time.

“In that spirit, we have chosen not to allow political ads on TikTok. 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 hard to argue with TikTok’s rationale here and we wouldn’t be surprised if some of its competitors rue not making such a decision too. The likes of Facebook presumably make loads of money from political advertising, but it comes with all sorts of baggage and scandal. There’s presumably plenty of money to be made from the teen-specific ad industry and TikTok would be wise to stick to that.