TikTok has permanently suspended the advertising account promoting Musk, the four hour documentary about Elon Musk directed by Oscar winning filmmaker Alex Gibney, according to TechCrunch and The Verge. Distributor Bleecker Street was notified that the account had received a permanent suspension due to its political content, The Hollywood Reporter reported, and TechCrunch said it had reached out to TikTok for comment.
TikTok is the latest platform to block the film’s promotion rather than the first. Ads for the trailer were initially rejected by Meta and YouTube as well, though both platforms eventually allowed the ad, with Meta attributing its rejection to an error. X, which Musk owns, has refused to carry ads for the film at all.
The ownership backdrop is part of the story. TikTok’s US operations are partly owned by Larry Ellison, a supporter of President Donald Trump, as is Musk. Gibney has also confirmed that international distributor Universal wavered over releasing the film before deciding to move forward.
Musk opened in just four theatres last weekend and is now rolling out more broadly, with a streaming release on HBO planned for next year. The sequence of rejections, one attributed to error and one now permanent, gives documentary distributors a concrete case study in how platform political advertising rules operate when the subject of the film owns or is close to the platforms themselves.