Meta has banned advertising from TikTok and its parent company ByteDance across seven markets, adding more fuel to the fire as the social media giants clash over audience reach, advertising and child safety.
The ban, which took effect on Thursday, covers advertising and paid marketing from ByteDance, as well as third-party campaigns directing users to TikTok and other ByteDance properties in the affected markets.
Markets including the United States, Canada, Egypt, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam are all covered by the restrictions. Australia however is not on the list, meaning advertisers can still run TikTok-linked campaigns on Meta platforms locally.
Meta confirmed the move to Bloomberg late last week, with spokesperson Chris Sgro defending the decision as a standard competitive practice.
“We don’t have to run ads from a competitor whose goal is to pull people off our apps,” Sgro told Bloomberg.
The move follows TikTok’s decision to strip Instagram and Facebook profile links from creator and user accounts in November last year, adding another front to the battle between the platforms for users and advertising dollars.
However, the rivalry extends beyond advertising, with Meta also pushing competitors to adopt stronger child safety measures.
In July, Meta announced it would begin notifying parents if their teen appears to be discussing suicide or self-harm with Meta AI on Instagram, Facebook and Messenger, marking one of the platform’s biggest expansions of AI safety measures for young users.
And in August, Meta agreed to an $18 billion settlement with US states that required it to implement child safety features across Facebook and Instagram. Legal experts said the measures could put pressure on competing platforms, including TikTok and YouTube, to make similar changes.
Meta has since taken its argument directly to the industry, running full-page advertisements in top newspapers across the US calling on rivals to follow its lead on child safety and criticising TikTok for not attending several US government meetings on screen time and the safety of young users.
Meanwhile, European regulators have also raised concerns about TikTok’s approach to protecting minors, warning the platform could face a fine of up to six per cent of its annual revenue if it breaches the bloc’s Digital Services Act.
The developments leave TikTok facing pressure from both regulators and a major competitor, as questions around platform safety increasingly intersect with the fight for audience attention.
B&T has contacted Meta and TikTok for comment.
