The Battle Over How Much Politics To Allow On TikTok
Forbes Daily Briefing
Forbes
4.6 • 12 Ratings
🗓️ 5 November 2024
⏱️ 5 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Tuesday, November 5th. |
| 0:04.0 | Today on Forbes, the battle over how much politics to allow on TikTok. |
| 0:10.0 | Over a weekend this past June, the team of TikTok staffers, tasked with preventing political ads from running on the app, |
| 0:18.0 | received an odd message from their boss. |
| 0:20.0 | It was a video of former President Donald Trump, who first attempted to ban TikTok from running on the app, received an odd message from their boss. |
| 0:25.8 | It was a video of former president Donald Trump, who first attempted to ban TikTok in 2020, |
| 0:29.1 | announcing he now opposed a ban on the platform. |
| 0:34.5 | The video was accompanied by a one-word message, written in all caps, quote, |
| 0:35.3 | Yep. |
| 0:40.5 | 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, |
| 0:47.3 | and what it said about the company's longstanding ban on political ads. Was this executive, |
| 0:52.5 | a longtime bite-dance China employee now living in Singapore, expressing |
| 0:56.4 | a preference for Trump because of his sudden opposition to a TikTok ban? Or was he simply |
| 1:01.3 | flagging the news to his American staff? Just hours after the message was sent, it was deleted, |
| 1:07.8 | a reminder of a sticky tension for TikTok. For years, a debate has raged inside the company about how it should handle political discourse |
| 1:15.4 | on its platform, which now boasts more U.S. users than people who voted in the 2020 presidential |
| 1:20.9 | election. |
| 1:22.2 | The issue has been especially sensitive as the company has faced multiple legislative inquiries, |
| 1:28.3 | a federal criminal investigation, lawsuits from numerous state attorneys general, and the passage of a new law that |
| 1:34.0 | requires its Chinese parent company, Bytance, to sell the app or see it banned. |
| 1:39.7 | According to six people with knowledge of the efforts, the company has considered changes |
| 1:43.8 | to how it handles both so-called organic political posts and political ads. |
... |
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