Meta Bans TikTok Ads in Seven Countries While It Has Money Riding on TikTok’s Teen Rules

Meta has banned ads from ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent, across Facebook and Instagram in the US and six other countries, The Verge reports, following a Bloomberg scoop. The ban took effect Thursday in the US, Canada, Egypt, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam. It covers ByteDance’s ads and paid marketing messages, plus any third-party ad that links to TikTok.

“We don’t have to run ads from a competitor whose goal is to pull people off our apps,” Meta spokesperson Christopher Sgro said. “Declining promotional services to a competitor is a normal business practice across industries. We will continue to compete on product quality and user experience.”

On the narrow point, Meta is right. Companies turn down rivals’ ads all the time, and TikTok drew its own line first: its support page says users can’t include links that “open or log you into other social media apps.” The ban doesn’t stop anyone from using TikTok, as TNW notes.

Meta also has a financial reason to care what TikTok does with its teen users. Its August settlement with US states put daily time limits and nighttime limits on young users of Facebook and Instagram, and part of the payout depends on rivals adopting similar measures, according to TNW. Since then Meta has bought newspaper ads demanding that rivals follow its lead, Engadget reports. In September, TikTok refused to run Meta’s ads calling on it to join the deal, saying they broke its rules on political content.

Meta is pushing its biggest rival to adopt the same limits that part of its own settlement money is tied to. As of Thursday, that rival can’t buy an ad on Facebook or Instagram in seven countries to make its case to users, or to recruit them.

The ban is written against ByteDance, which now holds 19.9% of the majority-American joint venture that runs TikTok in the US, an app with more than 200 million US users. Because it also covers any ad that sends people to TikTok, the ownership change doesn’t give the US business a way around it.

The states wanted the same protections for kids across every big app. The deal they wrote gives Meta a cash interest in getting there, and Meta controls one of the largest ad marketplaces its competitors would use to argue about it. Regulators usually hold that kind of power over a company. Here a company holds it over a rival.

TikTok is already giving ground state by state. Later in September it settled with Alabama, agreeing to usage limits and stronger age checks, and it still faces other state cases, including a New York lawsuit over teen safety. European regulators wrote this summer that TikTok hasn’t done enough to protect minors and could fine it up to 6% of its annual revenue. TikTok and ByteDance didn’t respond to Reuters’ requests for comment on Meta’s ban.

Sources

• The Verge: Meta is banning TikTok ads across its platforms
• TNW: Meta bans ByteDance and TikTok ads on Facebook and Instagram
• Engadget: Meta bans TikTok ads from its platforms in tit-for-tat row