Furthering our advertising transparency efforts: Introducing "About this ad"

At TikTok, we've seen advertising and marketing reimagined when brands come together with our community of over 1 billion to entertain and inspire each other. Advertising has become part of the TikTok experience as brands continue to express their authentic selves and build meaningful connections with the community. While we serve ads to keep our platform free and help you discover things you love, we're committed to being transparent about how we collect, use, and share data for advertising.

Understand more about the ads that you see

Advertising is an important part of the TikTok platform and we strive to create experience where users find value and joy in the brands they see. To achieve that, we may show users personalized ads, which are ads we think a user will be interested in. Starting in August, users will have more insights into their personalized ad experience.

We're introducing a new 'About this ad' feature, so users will be able to tap on any ad in their feed and view some reasons why we're showing this particular ad to them. This is another step we're taking to bring more transparency into our advertising practices and help users understand how ads work on TikTok.

'About this ad' can be found in the 'share' menu in the lower right corner of an ad, or with a long press on the ad. You'll be able to see factors that are used to deliver this ad to you. For example, you may see a car rental service ad because the age associated with your account is 25+, matched with the advertiser's targeting requirements for this ad. You may see a pet food ad based on TikTok's estimate of your interest in pets.

From the 'About this ad' page, users will also be able to access their Ad Personalization settings and make changes to their preferences in just a few taps. Users can also click on "Learn more" to visit "Ads and Your Data", our latest guides for users to understand how we use data for advertising.

'About this ad' is now available globally. We strive to create an enriching ad experience for both users and brands and we will continue to add more features to 'About this ad' in the coming months, for example: disclosing the advertiser behind a certain ad and giving users more options to control their ad experience.

More control over your ad experience

As we continue learning from the TikTok community about ways to build a better advertising experience, we're working on new solutions that enable to the community to see ads that are relevant to their interests. As part of these efforts, we've also made more control features available in Ads Personalization settings.

Users can manage whether their ads are based on estimates of their interests or gender. For example, users can choose to turn off the interest category "Beauty" so they will receive fewer ads that target to match this interest. Users can change their gender setting or input any gender of their choosing. These updates can be changed at any time in the app and apply only to users' ad settings, which does not affect other TikTok services.

Where we go from here

'About this ad' is the latest step in our ongoing journey to enhance advertising transparency and create a trusted space for entertainment and creative self-expression. We're taking a number of steps towards our commitment to a privacy-first approach for our community with increased transparency:

• Introduce new ways to help users understand why they see certain ads and how they can make meaningful choices about their personalized ad experience.

• Provide resources that empower both users and advertisers to stay in control and build positive connections.

• Expand our product solutions into new markets.

• Continue teaming up with industry partners and associations to explore more innovative solutions for advertising transparency.

There is no finish line when it comes to fulfilling our commitment to privacy and transparency. We continue to safeguard our users' information and provide our community with a range of privacy, safety and security controls as they choose the TikTok experience that's right for them. We look forward to sharing more about our ongoing work.