The EU looks to blockchain for verification processes
The European Commission aims to use blockchain technology to streamline the cross-border verification process for credentials.
TikTok has announced that certain advertisements would be banned from the platform, including crypto urrency-based content and promotions of digital financial products.
According to an article from FT Advisor, the social media platform’s new regulations in advertising accepted will be more strict about financial content. In 2020, TikTok became a massively popular platform for users to share videos to either educate or entice new investors to the market. Dogecoin, in particular, saw masses of TikTok users content created and share related videos to pump the coin up. According to Martin Bamford from Informed Choice, this new ban is possibly in place to protect vulnerable users from falling prey to branded content from affiliated strategies or sponsored content that might not be transparent in marketing efforts. He noted:
“My interpretation of this is [TikTok] are clamping down on directly or indirectly sponsored content which leads to an affiliate link, for example to sign up to a trading platform and get free stocks. We see a huge amount of this branded content on TikTok, usually from poorly informed commentators, who lure in followers with promises of riches, but in reality are making their money off people signing up via affiliate links.”
Covid caution: Crypto schemes and fraud on the ride
This clampdown on financial content might not apply to all financial products – but it is clear that promotional content will be removed. Other platforms have been experiencing higher levels of promotional ‘advice’ and scam advertisement appear too. This is likely as a result of the pandemic, as more and more users are now looking to digital finances to avoid contact payments. Google, for example, has also had to make moves to regulate advertisements and reduce the financial fraud appearing in searches. As per the FT notice, Google has shifted to ensuring all financial services advertisers demonstrate that they are authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority before any sort of promotional content is published.
Despite the crackdown on crypto-ads and content reduction on the platforms, the market is still trading in modest amounts of green with Bitcoin Ethereum, Ripple and Dogecoin all showing a daily trading increase between 1% and 2%,