Twitter has also had a searchable ads archive since 2018. “It is unclear how TikTok is monitoring this content to ensure that it complies with their political ad policy.”Īnother major criticism in the report is the general lack of ads transparency by TikTok vs other social platforms - with Mozilla’s report pointing out that it does not offer public, searchable ad databases as others (including Facebook/Instagram, Snap, and Google/YouTube) do. “There do not appear to be any safeguards preventing creators from using this feature to promote paid political messages,” it warns. if not combined with active policing and enforcement of sponsorship disclosures. Mozilla’s report also points to rumours that TikTok is testing features that will allow influencers to pay to further promote specific posts - which could dial up the ‘dark money’ political disinformation problem further, i.e. Federal Trade Commission guidelines for the disclosure of paid influence.īut, as Mozilla points out, if TikTok isn’t actively monitoring or scrutinizing influencer ads (as the report suggests) it raises an obvious concern over how the platform can claim to be enforcing its “trust and safety” protocols. Per TikTok’s rules, content creators are supposed to self-identify any paid content (typically by using the hashtag #ad or #sponsored), in keeping with U.S. “Of course, it’s hard to know exactly how self-disclosure ad policies are being enforced across platforms but TikTok is significantly far behind Instagram and YouTube when it comes to providing tools and enacting clear, strict, and transparent policies,” Mozilla writes in the report. In the report, Th€se Are Not Po£itical Ad$: How Partisan Influencers Are Evading TikTok’s Weak Political Ad Policies, Mozilla calls out the platform for not offering adequate tools for ‘influencers’ - aka users who have amassed a large enough number of followers to become attractive targets for advertisers to target for making paid postings - to report sponsorships, pointing out that other major social media platforms (like Facebook/Instagram) do offer such tools and can flag influencer content if they’re found failing to properly report ads. For instance, The 99 Problems created and funded the Hype House account House of US, where influencers post political messaging.” It similarly found evidence of left-leaning sponsored political messaging being spread without proper disclosures by TikTok influencers, noting that: “We found some evidence that progressive influencers supported by left-leaning political organizations were posting pro-Biden messages prior to the U.S. Examples of TikTok influencers spreading political messaging (Image credits: Mozilla)
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