Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, November 18) — President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has partnered with TikTok to introduce “edutainment,” an educational and entertainment service to help promote products of small-scale sellers to the social media platform’s 50 million users in the country.
In a statement, Malacañang said Marcos noted the popularity of TikTok and agreed with TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew to train local sellers and promote their products through the platform.
“We want to give more resources and highlight and train the local sellers in the more rural parts of the country because that’s one thing interesting on the platform. What we want to do is highlight local products, especially from smaller [sellers],” Chew told Marcos in a meeting during the president’s trip to San Francisco, California.
Chew said this partnership is also made with other Southeast Asian countries, including Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia.
The official from TikTok assured Marcos that there are rules implemented to “keep people civil and keep the platform safe.”
“So, if there’s anything that crosses the guidelines, we will moderate. And we have local representatives who are working very closely with one of the regulators as well,” Chew said.
Marcos agreed with Chew and said it is “difficult to differentiate between what is just a strong opinion as against what is considered as fake news.”
“But just the differences in opinion and how they’re expressed, that sometimes is very hard to determine where it is excessive and where it is acceptable,” Marcos said.
“TikTok, from the beginning, was quite really just a very lighthearted platform but then just because of its popularity, for example, for someone like me who’s in politics, if you’re talking to 50 million people, then I need to be part of that conversation,” he added.
TikTok was introduced in the Philippines during its international launch in May 2017 while TikTok Shop, the platform’s e-commerce section, was launched in April last year.
TikTok said it sees Southeast Asia as its biggest emerging market outside the USA, with its 325 million monthly active users covering nearly half the region’s population.
Last year, TikTok Shop’s GMV (gross merchandise value) in Southeast Asia was $4.4 billion, a fraction of the region’s e-commerce GMV of $131 billion that year.
TikTok is a short-form video hosting service developed by ByteDance, a Beijing-based company incorporated in the Cayman Islands.
