TikTok accused of pro-Hamas bias as it bans ads featuring hostages for being “too political”
Accusations that TikTok has an anti-Israel bias were strengthened when the Chinese-owned video social media platform refused to run paid advertisements from Israel’s Hostages and Missing Persons Forum. While TikTok claimed the video ads were “too political”, they have run videos advocating for the Palestinians..
Such ads, featuring video clips depicting the lives of ordinary civilians and children held captive by Hamas, a US-designated terror organization, had already been run on Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram before being refused by TikTok, owned by ByteDance, a Chinese internet technology company headquartered in Beijing. TikTok does accept ads from paid campaigns highlighting the plight of Palestinian children in Gaza.
Content creation manager for the Hostages and Missing Families Forum Yossi Lubaton told Fox News that TikTok declined to run the ads, saying its advertising policies do not allow for ads that include “the use of campaign slogans” or those that contain “depictions of war, weapons, hostages and violence.”
“We were told that according to their policy, we were unable to place paid campaigns because they were considered too political or too graphic,” Lubaton said. “They told us it was a strict policy that was applied to the Israeli side, as well as to the other side, and so we started to put the paid campaign on Facebook and Google instead.”
Fox News reported on an internal memo, written by a senior TikTok employee in the Israel office and seen by Fox News Digital, that “highlighted in detail an unequal policy toward the paid humanitarian campaigns pitched by Israeli families as compared to pro-Palestinian groups, as well as a flippant, even biased, approach to organic content uploaded by users to the site that is graphically violent and deeply inciting – violating some of the company’s own community guidelines.”
The memo noted that “there are many employees within the company – primarily those working as moderators within the Trust and Safety Unit – who have openly expressed “support for terrorism or endorsed extremist movements” that work against Israel. “
Jewish employees told Fox Business antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiments are expressed freely by other employees on the company’s internal chat system, Lark, which includes a recently created support group dedicated to the Palestinians but no such option for Israelis because the company considered it too political.
A spokesperson for TikTok responded by saying, “These allegations are false and do not reflect TikTok policies in any way.”
“We are clear in our advertising policies what content is allowed to be advertised and apply those policies equally to all ads on TikTok,” the spokesperson said, adding, “We invest heavily in training our moderators to apply these policies consistently.”
The post TikTok accused of pro-Hamas bias as it bans ads featuring hostages for being “too political” appeared first on Israel365 News.
Israel in the News
