Over a weekend this past June, the team of TikTok staffers tasked with preventing political ads from running on the app received an odd message from their boss. It was a video of former president Donald Trump — who first attempted to ban TikTok in 2020 — announcing he now opposed a ban on the platform. The video was accompanied by a one-word message, written in all caps: “YEP…”
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 and what it said about the company’s longstanding ban on political ads. Was this executive, a longtime ByteDance China employee now living in Singapore, expressing a preference for Trump because of his sudden opposition to a TikTok ban? Or was he simply flagging the news to his American staff?
Just hours after the message was sent, it was deleted, a reminder of a sticky tension for TikTok. For years, a debate has raged inside the company about how it should handle political discourse on its platform, which now boasts more U.S. users than people who voted in the 2020 presidential election. The issue has been especially sensitive as the company has faced multiple legislative inquiries, a federal criminal investigation, lawsuits from numerous state attorneys general, and the passage of a new law that requires its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the app or see it banned.
According to six people with knowledge of the efforts, the company has considered changes to how it handles both “organic” political posts and political ads.
One proposal brought to the group earlier this year would have the company partner with select “authoritative” news publications to boost the publications’ distribution.
A working group of senior employees known as Project Core has met regularly for several years to consider the role of potentially polarizing discourse on the TikTok platform. The group’s name was a nod to the idea that TikTok is — at its “core” — a place for lighthearted videos, rather than shitposting or doomscrolling. Project Core considered research on what........