TikTok has banned content creators from making paid political posts ahead of the coming US elections in November. The social media company has taken its political misinformation prevention techniques a notch higher.
With its growing popularity, TikTok has been grouped together with Meta’s Facebook and Twitter in targeted criticism for allowing political misinformation to thrive.
Its first response was to stop allowing paid political ads on the platform. However, this obstacle was surmounted by paying content creators to post political ads instead and reach more people.
In order to block this gap, Eric Han, TikTok’s head of US safety, said that the company would have briefings with both creators and talent agencies to remind them that paid political posts were against the company’s policies.
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In the future, as soon as TikTok internal teams spot a political ad, they will remove it from the platform. The teams will also be in charge of determining whether political content was likely paid for or not. It is not clear how the company plans to do that, as some content creators could have real political affiliations and may be posting content to promote their candidates without being paid.
However, TikTok added that the teams would rely on media reports and ‘outside partners’ to determine what posts violate its policies.
Facebook and Instagram had announced that they would start restricting political advertisers from running new ads one week before the election. Meanwhile, Twitter said it would resume applying labels on misleading tweets and reliable information to debunk them on timelines.
It is important that the strategies that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter announced were the same ones that they rolled out for the 2020 election. Twitter’s labels were what prompted Trump’s eviction from the platform.
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