President Marcos has set a partnership with the short-form video-hosting service TikTok to help local micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), particularly by training them, to promote their products.

Marcos said this as he met with TikTok Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Shou Zi Chew on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Economic Leaders' Meeting in San Francisco on Friday, Nov. 17 (Manila time).

In his remarks, the President noted the platform's popularity in the Philippines, with around 50 million users, and agreed with Chew to train small-scale sellers and entrepreneurs and promote their products using the app.

According to Chew, they have "seen a lot of this" in other Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam.

"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," he told Marcos.

"What we want to do is highlight local products, especially from smaller [sellers]," he added.

As more people utilize TikTok for their businesses, Chew stressed that their safety is essential as the platform promotes "edutainment" (education and entertainment) and inclusivity for small sellers.

"So, we want to keep it at that — rules that keep people civil and keep the platform safe. So, we have community guidelines like no violence, no [to] sexual abuse material, we have all these guidelines, and we have a team of people who moderate content," he explained.

"We have a local representative who is working very closely with one of the regulators as well. We get feedback and move very quickly if there is something that we spot is violated on the platform, and that's something that we take extremely seriously," he added.

President Marcos agreed with Chew, saying it was difficult to differentiate a strong opinion from what could be considered fake news. He, however, trusted that TikTok's guidelines were enough.

TikTok is a short-form video hosting service developed by ByteDance, a Beijing-based company incorporated in the Cayman Islands, and was introduced to the Philippines in May 2017.

In April last year, the company launched TikTok Shop, TikTok's e-commerce section where users can browse and purchase products they see in videos on their feeds.

TikTok 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 in Southeast Asia was $4.4 billion, a fraction of the region's e-commerce GMV of $131 billion that year.