Executive Summary

This paper begins with a high-level research of TikTok’s ad placement, ad formats and ad targeting and TikTok’s current policy on political advertising.

Next, an overview of the political ad strategies adopted by Facebook, Google, Twitter and Snapchat is compiled into a table.

This paper provides two types of recommendations.

The first is a list of strategic considerations that should inform the development of TikTok's political ad strategy. They are:

1. Monetization should not be the emphasis of TikTok's political ad strategy.
2. TikTok's political ad policy must cohere with product strategy, content moderation policy and localization strategy. This has significant organizational implications as coordination among the teams working on these different aspects of TikTok is necessary.
3. Rightly or wrongly, TikTok is perceived as a "Chinese app" and should expect to receive extra, perhaps even unfair, scrutiny of its ad/content moderation policies.

The second is a list of high-level measures TikTok should adopt. They are:

1. Emulate the best practices by US tech companies.

   • Require identity verification, disclosure, disclaimer and ad labelling for political/issues ads
   • Roll out country-specific rule-setting and rule-enforcement
   • Limit targeting capabilities for political/issue ads
   • Build out an ad archive

   The extent of TikTok's investments in these measures is a function of how much it expects to grow and the scrutiny it expects to receive.

2. Use internal alignment and external transparency to mitigate complexity.

   • Internal alignment: ensure rules, processes, and priorities are simple, transparent and widely publicized
   • External transparency: communicate with external stakeholders with a presumption towards transparency and assume internal decisions will receive external scrutiny

3. Advocate for government regulations

   • Many issues of political advertising (and content moderation) are really public policy issues that should be determined by governments, not companies
   • Such regulations are likely to consolidate the position of incumbent companies

概要

首先，本文对 TikTok的广告位置、广告格式和当前的政治广告政策进行了初步概括。

其次，本文对Facebook，Google，Twitter 和 Snapchat 的政治广告政策进行了详细的分析，将其根据几个维度分解，并把结果汇总在一个表格中。

再次，本文提出两大建议：

建议一：关于 TikTok 在制定政治广告政策的战略考量：

1. 变现不应该是 TikTok 政治广告政策的重点。
2. TikTok 政治广告政策必须保持产品战略、内容审核政策及本地化策略的一致性。这意味着在组织层面，TikTok 必须确保负责这些不同工作的团队之间有足够的协调。
3. TikTok 在国外被认为是个“中国APP”，因此其广告政策和内容审核政策，一定会收到更多、甚至是双重标准的外界审查。