TikTok is about to be split in two. The largest social media market in the world, the US, will soon forcibly acquire the company’s American operations and put it in the hands of a conglomerate of tech and media billionaires. They will be able to run it however they choose.
How might the two TikToks diverge?
The primary change people are concerned about is any retuning of the TikTok algorithm for American users. Others will write on that at length, and the service will be watched like a hawk, particularly for any political shifts to the right.
But our interest is in political campaigns and advertising, and one of the quirks of TikTok has been its ban on political ads. Several years ago, the company looked at this market and decided such advertising was more trouble than it was worth. This looked like a rational enough move for a Chinese-owned and controlled company given (real or imagined) US concerns about national security risks of “the algorithm”, the extensive user data the company was acquiring and in light of pending regulation in the EU and elsewhere.
But, if these risks (as the US perceives them) go away, it seems obvious that the American version of Tiktok will be extremely tempted to introduce political advertising as soon as possible.
The upsides for the company seem significant. In the six months leading up to last year’s US elections, campaigns spent more than $1.1bn on political ads across Google and Meta. Flicking a switch to allow political ads gives TikTok a significant share of that pie, and probably grows it significantly too. Its new owners will immediately benefit from yet another critical, existential US election cycle. Political ads will also give them some leverage with lawmakers. “Our service helped you reach voters, raise money and get elected” is a powerful statement to make, as regulators, committees and legislators weigh up the harms of social media, and what to do about them.
Many campaigns would like to see the end of the ban too. With TikTok ads, they’ll be able to reach a younger, highly engaged audience, in a more targeted way, without having to discover the magical viral juice that makes some politicians fly (but most die) on vertical video.
If campaigns like it, campaign consultants will too, as they’ll take a healthy cut of media buys and production fees. A new channel is a huge new opportunity for them. It also simplifies things for them somewhat. Instead of needing to find podcasters and influencers to tap haphazardly into the cultural current of our times, you just pay to insert your client’s message between the endless scroll and tap of videos.
However, there might be one key opponent – the Trump administration itself. TikTok is now the most used platform in the US. After 2024, Trump went from wanting to ban it, to believing “it helped me win the election in a landslide”. Part of the “Will he? Won’t he?” of the proposed ban follows from this. Getting ByteDance to cede the service to his political allies creates the potential for TikTok to follow in the footsteps of X, and have content filtered and redirected in a more conservative, MAGA direction. The tricky balance will be whether the new ownership can keep the current broad user base, while turning the dial to the right (something that Musk’s X has failed to do).
But allowing political ads on TikTok gives the Democrats, who consistently raise and spend more online than Republicans and whose base will be very motivated for the 2026 midterms, a stronger foothold on the service. This would create some islands of blue in a river of (potentially) deep red content.
This seems like most probable fudge. Like X chose to immediately after Musk took over, TikTok will unban political ads, while simultaneously having its algorithm steered rightwards. Trump’s allies will gain a significant new revenue stream for TikTok and further enrich themselves, provided they don’t follow Elon Musk over a cliff and destroy the reputation of their new toy. And of course, as night follows day, American election campaigns will get even more expensive and ad-soaked.
Some things never change.
A few notes:
- TikTok’s political ad “ban” prevents mainstream actors buying ads on the network. However, multiple researchers have found themselves able to work around the ban and run ads that contravene the policy. Some of this research has made its way into formal complaints to regulators, which are making their way through the regulatory process.
- TikTok’s ad library, built to meet regulatory requirements in the EU, is pretty limited, and currently EU-only. There is no ad library for the US and because of TikTok’s “ban” on them, no specific treatment of political or issue advertising, such as advertiser verification or additional transparency.
- There’s little practical possibility of tech regulation in the US at this point in time. Meta and Google built and launched political ad libraries and advertiser verification programmes in 2018 as a way to head off more stringent regulation of political advertising. If TikTok enters the US political ad market without any of these features, and feels no pressure to build them, this creates an unpredictable asymmetry vis-a-vis the other platforms. X hasn’t reintroduced its previous level of ad transparency in the US, and has faced little pushback (though the volume of political ads on X is very low). Democratic politicians should signal they support transparency and verification, and would legislate on this if and when they re-take control of parts of the US government.
- We support a high level of transparency and verification for political advertisers. We’ve published extensively on this, including a technical specification for an ad transparency standard which platforms can use to build out their ad libraries and APIs. We’d be delighted to talk with TikTok or any other advertising-powered service about how they could implement this.