TikTok Criticized for Blocking Hostage Campaign While Allowing Pro-Palestinian Ads

American news network Fox News reports that the social media platform TikTok refused to host a paid campaign from the Israeli hostage families' forum, while allowing campaigns from pro-Palestinian organizations.

The hostage families' campaign, which was approved for publication on Facebook and Instagram, featured short videos about the lives of Israelis kidnapped to Gaza on October 7th, calling for their return. TikTok labeled the campaign as "political" and refused to publish it, despite permitting campaigns from pro-Palestinian groups showing children in Gaza forced to leave their homes due to fighting.

Further investigations by Fox report that a senior TikTok Israel employee described in an internal memo how the company's advertising policy is biased, favoring pro-Palestinian groups. According to him, many employees openly support Hamas and other extremist terrorist groups, including those responsible for content moderation. Consequently, content against Jews and Israel is increasing on the network.

Yossi Loubaton, an advertiser with the hostage families' headquarters, told the news network that a few weeks after the massacre, staff approached TikTok and were told, "According to their policy, we can't display paid campaigns because they are considered political or too graphic. They told us it was a clear policy applied to both sides, so we started running the paid campaign on Facebook and Google instead."

TikTok responded to the investigation by stating, "These allegations are false and do not reflect TikTok's policy in any way. Our advertising policy is very clear about what is allowed on the platform, and we enforce it equally for all TikTok ads. We invest significantly in training the team responsible for moderation to consistently apply our policy."

Following the report, Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi demanded from TikTok management to correct this "terrible injustice," and announced that in the coming days, his office is expected to receive a response regarding approval for advertising under the tag "Together We Will Overcome."