San Francisco (AFP)

Entertainment, not Politics: The Social Video Sharing Network TikTok announced that it would not allow political ads, while it is accused by some organizations of censoring certain topics such as protests in Hong Kong .

Owned by California-based group ByteDance, the platform launched three years ago has built its popularity among teens and pre-teens on sharing short original videos, such as karaoke or challenges.

The application has gradually opened to advertising, but "we intend to respect the reasons why our users love TikTok: this light and irreverent feeling that makes it a really nice place to go," said Blake Chandlee, vice president of international partnerships, in an online statement.

"In this spirit, we have chosen not to allow political ads on TikTok (...) that do not integrate, in our opinion, the experience of the platform," he says.

Advertisements aimed at supporting or rejecting political figures or political ideas will therefore have no place on the "app" that claimed 500 million users last year.

Social platforms like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube are routinely accused of being used as a vehicle for misinformation campaigns or user manipulation, after foreign interference scandals, via networks, in US and UK polls in 2016.

Facebook, in particular, has tightened the rules on political advertising to try to prevent further abuses.

TikTok, meanwhile, is suspected of censorship by several English-language newspapers, which are surprised to find very few videos on the hostile demonstrations in Beijing, which have been taking place in Hong Kong for several months.

"The popular social network TikTok asks its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen, claims for Tibetan independence or the religious group banned Falun Gong, according to the guidelines (which we consulted)," said late September The Guardian, a British newspaper.

In early 2019, TikTok has passed the billion downloads mark worldwide, not to mention China (where the equivalent app is called Douyin), according to Sensor Tower.

Its success among young people regularly feeds concerns, the application being partly confronted with the same excesses as other social networks, such as harassment, their use as a hunting ground by pedophiles, endangering via videos of challenges etc. .

© 2019 AFP