By Blake Chandlee, Vice President of Global Business Solutions, TikTok

At TikTok, we're excited to be building a home for creative expression – a place where an eclectic range of short videos offer a truly joyful experience. We know users gravitate to TikTok because it provides a positive, refreshing environment that inspires their creativity, and we look to foster that through things like fun filters, product features, and brand partnerships.

This creativity is also where we're seeing brands have the most success on the platform as they embrace the unique spirit and authenticity of the TikTok community. Through native advertising formats – like sponsored hashtag challenges that invite user participation and engagement in a brand's campaign, or in-feed ads that use the immersive, short-form TikTok style – brands are using the app to take an unconventional and modern marketing approach.

The decision to allow paid ads into the community experience is one we treat carefully. We're in the early days of introducing and experimenting with different ad formats, and we're exploring a variety of opportunities for brand partners – including the newly-launched TikTok Creator Marketplace, a beta program that enables brands to discover, connect, and engage with talented creators on marketing campaigns. Brands are increasingly looking to creators for insights and partnerships in building quality content, and we see demand for more collaborative opportunities between brands and creators.

Throughout all of this, however, our primary focus is on creating an entertaining, genuine experience for our community. While we explore ways to provide value to brands, we're intent on always staying true to why users uniquely love the TikTok platform itself: for the app's light-hearted and irreverent feeling that makes it such a fun place to spend time.

In that spirit, we have chosen not to allow political ads on TikTok. Any paid ads that come into the community need to fit the standards for our platform, and the nature of paid political ads is not something we believe fits the TikTok platform experience. To that end, we will not allow paid ads that promote or oppose a candidate, current leader, political party or group, or issue at the federal, state, or local level – including election-related ads, advocacy ads, or issue ads. For more, see our ad guidelines.

For us, it all points back to our mission: to inspire creativity and build joy. We want to ensure we're building a place where our community – users, creators, and brands – can be creative, build trends, and have a whole lot of fun in the process. People come to TikTok because it just feels different from so many other places, and we'll continue to work hard to support that.