‘It’s Easy to Make a Million’: Political Advertising on TikTok and the uneven Electoral Dispute of 2024
- erickdau
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
In recent years, digital platforms have been under increasing pressure to adopt transparency practices for their operations and business model, especially with regard to advertising placement. By way of offering some degree of visibility into how content advertising is distributed, some platforms provide tools such as ad repositories. These are often criticized for their low effectiveness and the limited data they offer, especially because they depend on the advertiser itself to classify an advertisement as political for the ad to be included in the repository.
In Brazil, Superior Electoral Court Resolution No. 23,732/2024 establishes binding obligations to increase the transparency of online political and electoral advertising, including requiring platforms that run such ads to maintain a searchable repository of advertising material. Like most social media platforms, TikTok claims to not allow political ads, thus seeking to exempt itself from its transparency responsibilities, but without any real guarantees of effectively enforcing the rules.
In this report, we analyze the platform's activity during the course of the 2024 municipal elections, through a case study which focuses on the campaign for Mayor of São Paulo. From the platform’s Commercial Content Library, which fulfills its transparency obligations in the European Union, Switzerland and United Kingdom, we searched for all 10 candidates in the election and identified 137 ads that mentioned and/or promoted Pablo Marçal (PRTB) since the beginning of the pre-campaign and throughout the first-round campaign. While it is not possible to confirm that all of them were broadcast in Brazil, it is highly likely that they were, since many were written in Portuguese and promoted by Brazilian advertisers.
The study shows weaknesses in the platform’s advertising transparency system, in addition to revealing moderation failures and risks to electoral equality and national sovereignty. It also reinforces the need for robust regulatory measures which can guarantee access to information in the public interest, allow for monitoring the practices of these companies and make them accountable, when applicable.
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