TikTok’s advertising push as under-16 social media ban looms

As the under-16 social media ban looms, one of the tech giants is spending big on advertising the virtues of its app.

TikTok is pushing the app’s benefits for teens into as many faces as it can as the under-16 social media ban looms at the end of this year.

The social media giant took out sprawling ads in the Australian Financial Review last week, covering 4½ full pages with marketing, promoting the platform’s utility for getting teens to read, engage with education and even cast a lure.

The newspaper ads, along with a big spend on billboards and bus shelters, comes as the under-16 social media ban is just six months away.

Advertisements in the May 26 edition of the AFR claim TikTok serves up 10 million videos in its science, technology, engineering, and maths feed. Another of the full-page ads extols the benefits of the massively popular “bookTok” – TikTok’s literary community.

The third subject-specific ad claims Australian teenagers are “getting outside”, inspired by the platform’s fishing content.

A TikTok Australia spokesman said the company had also invested in billboard and bus shelter ads recently but was unable to provide numbers or details.

In six months’, any Australian under the age of 16 will be banned from all social media; YouTube has been granted an exemption on educational grounds, drawing the ire of the other platforms.

How the social media ban will work is still up in the air.

The federal government has been sitting on a report since January concerning Australians’ attitudes toward age assurance technologies.

A British company has been tasked with trialling which technologies could be used to implement the world first, under-16 ban. On Friday, that UK firm revealed a report on its findings had been pushed back to July.

Originally published as TikTok’s advertising push as under-16 social media ban looms