Tiktok’s PR department is supposed to downplay and withhold information. Internal documents show that. It’s about the parent company Bytedance and young users.
Tiktok’s PR department is apparently instructed to downplay sensitive issues and deliberately release vague or incomplete information. This is suggested by a report by the Gizmodo portal, which is based on two internal Tiktok documents that are available to the portal. These are instructions for employees of the PR department.
The more extensive document contains various key messages that Tiktok wants to spread, according to the Gizmodo report. In the first four lines, in addition to the commonplace that TikTok should be emphasized as a brand or platform, there are three clear instructions: Tiktok’s parent company Bytedance should be downplayed, the connection to China and the topic of AI. This indicates that these topics are considered particularly problematic for Tiktok’s own image.
Spending limit: $1000 per day
One of the unwelcome topics is probably the young age of the Tiktok user base. According to the leaked documents, the PR department should always emphasize that young people love Tiktok, but that the app is only intended for people aged 13 and over. The public relations staff are therefore not allowed to speak of “children” but of young people.
The PR department should refute any concerns that these young people could spend their parents’ money in the Tiktok app: the app has a spending limit, the employees should counter. The PR staff apparently only find out that this is around 1,000 US dollars per day “for internal information”.
“No algo talk” and “DO NOT USE”
In order to respond to inquiries about China or the parent company Bytedance, the PR officers are given specific quotes in the internal documents. When asked about the relationship between Tiktok and ByteDance, the PR department should answer that Tiktok employees cannot comment on the umbrella company. However, they seem to get detailed information about Bytedance – under the “DO NOT USE” instruction. The Tiktok employees should apparently avoid possible questions about the relationship with China by emphasizing the relationship with the USA and global investors.
Another critical issue seems to be Tiktok’s recommendation algorithm. According to the leaked documents, the public relations officers should not get involved in discussions (“No algo talk”), but claim that the personalized feed promotes the discovery of new music. This item in the “Music” section is even highlighted in red, according to Gizmodo’s report on the documents.
Tiktok points to others
The documents also apparently address the moderation at Tiktok. It should be publicly emphasized that Tiktok is a young company and has learned from its mistakes. Local teams are now responsible for moderating content and adapting this to the respective market. In 2019 it became known that the moderation teams depended on Tiktok to censor content related to Tiananmen Square, for example. The documents that have now been leaked suggest that this practice at Tiktok is still considered appropriate for some markets.
When it comes to privacy, Tiktok is pointing the finger at others. The PR instructions here apparently emphasize that other platforms would also collect data. Compared to many of them, Tiktok collects as much or less data, and the type of data collected is similar. Tiktok prides itself on not collecting detailed location data, unlike other platforms, according to Gizmodo. An editing comment in the internal document marks the section with three red exclamation marks.
Wording often adopted
According to Gizmodo, several press statements show the influence of the leaked documents on public relations at Tiktok. These often have similar wording to the key messages from the documents – and this applies not only to statements to the media, but also to the testimony of a Tiktok executive before the UK Parliament and to letters from Tiktok to US senators. A request from voonze online for a statement from Tiktok is ongoing.
