TikTok Executive Says Platform is for Entertainment and is Not Social Network

Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s head of global business solutions, says his company specializes is entertainment, not social media.

TikTok hasn’t seen an advertising slowdown despite what other companies are saying, Chandlee also added.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is retooling the Facebook and Instagram apps to be more like Tik Tok’s short video service. But TikTok has no interest in mimicking Facebook.

“Facebook is a social platform,” Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s president of global business solutions, told CNBC in an interview on Thursday. “They’ve built all their algorithms based on the social graph. That is their core competency. Ours is not.”

Chandlee spent 12 years at Facebook before joining TikTok in 2019.

According to the executive, Facebook will likely run into trouble if it tries to copy TikTok, and will end up offering an inferior experience to users and brands.

Facebook launched Instagram Reels in 2020 as its first real foray into the short-form video market. Last year, it brought the service over to its core Facebook app.

“We are an entertainment platform,” Chandlee said. “The difference is significant. It’s a massive difference.”

Facebook app chief Tom Alison told The Verge recently that he sees TikTok increasingly stealing share from the world’s largest social network.

Facebook plans to modify its primary feed to look more like TikTok by recommending more content regardless of whether it’s shared by friends.

“I think the thing we probably didn’t fully embrace or see is how social this format could be,” Alison told The Verge.

TikTok is owned by China’s ByteDance, which is privately held.

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.