TikTok banned me for the category. Then it sold the category.

What I found in my inbox four hours after losing 94,000 followers.

I got permanently banned at one thirty in the morning. Ninety-four thousand followers, seven hundred and eighty-eight videos, four years, gone before I was fully awake. That story is its own log.

A few hours later I opened my email and TikTok's own creator marketplace was inviting me to a paid brand campaign in the exact category that had just gotten me removed.

I want to walk you through what that brief actually said, because I think it is the most instructive document I have read all year, and because twenty-six people are about to take the deal.

The brief

Posted August 25. Submissions due August 31. One hundred dollars flat. Thirty-nine seats when I first looked, twenty-six a few days later.

The ask, in the brand's own framing: create conversion-focused TikTok video ads for their products without explicitly mentioning “GLP-1” or “weight loss.”

Not “be careful with claims.” Not “follow the guidelines.” Do not say the words.

It goes further. The videos should feel like genuine recommendations from a friend rather than polished healthcare commercials. It supplies the hooks to use. I wish I found this sooner. I was paying way more than I needed to. I finally found something with straightforward pricing.

It supplies the value props too. Plans from a hundred and twelve dollars a month. A promo code. No charge for medication unless a licensed provider approves the prescription. A pharmacy partner that ships in two business days.

And then it hands you the structure. Hook, personal problem, discovery, experience, value, call to action.

That is a complete recipe for a prescription drug advertisement engineered to not look like one.

Now here is the part where I stop being smug

My first reaction was the obvious one. They banned me for this and then tried to sell me this. Hypocrites.

I sat with it for a day and read the actual policy, and the truth is more interesting than the hypocrisy.

TikTok's Regulated Goods policy prohibits the trade, marketing, or provision of access to regulated goods. And it defines trade to include the redirection of goods or services. A link on your profile pointing to somewhere a regulated product is sold is itself the violation. Not the video. Not the caption. The link.

But that same policy carves out an exception. Registered business accounts and verified sellers can market some regulated items if they meet the requirements. Limited paid advertising is allowed from verified registered businesses.

So there are two lanes.

In lane one you are a person with a link in your bio. Everything you post is organic, unpaid, and prohibited.

In lane two you are a company with a verified business account and an ad budget. The same subject matter is a product TikTok will happily sell placement for.

I was in lane one. Corsica is in lane two. Neither of us broke the other's rules. The system worked exactly as written.

That is not hypocrisy. It is something more uncomfortable. It means the content was never the problem. Your commercial status was.

The people I am actually worried about

Twenty-six creators are going to make those videos for a hundred dollars.

Here is what the brief does not mention. The FTC's position is that influencers are advertisers. Not conduits, not participants. Advertisers, who can be held personally liable for deceptive endorsements and undisclosed material connections. That guidance has been tightening for two straight years, with specific attention to weight-loss and GLP-1 alternative marketing.

So a brand is paying a hundred dollars for a video that is deliberately built to obscure that it is an ad, in a drug category regulators are actively watching, and the individual exposure sits with the creator who made it. The brand has a legal department. The creator has a ring light.

If you are one of the twenty-six, I am not telling you what to do. I am telling you to read the brief one more time and notice that every instruction in it moves risk from them to you.

What I would tell myself in April

• Read the definitions, not the summary. Every platform policy has a glossary at the bottom and that is where the words that will end you are hiding. Mine was “redirection.” It was sitting there in public the entire time.
• Know which lane you are in. If you have a link that leads to a sale, you are commercial whether you feel like it or not, and you are in the lane with the rules and none of the permissions. Registering the business is not bureaucracy, it is the difference between a product and a violation.
• Assume the crawler is smarter than your disclaimer. Meta and Google follow the link, and then the link after that. Nobody is reading your caption.
• Build the thing they cannot delete. This is the one that actually matters. I had six thousand email addresses sitting in an account I had been ignoring for months while I poured everything into a platform that removed me without a phone call and then addressed the denial to “Dear TikTok user.”

Four years and they could not spell my name.

The list is still there. The app is still there. The domains are still there. That is the whole lesson and it cost me ninety-four thousand people to learn it.

Stay Bold. Stay Inspired.

This is a description of a creator marketplace brief as it appeared in August 2026 and of TikTok's published Regulated Goods policy at that time. It is not legal advice, and it is not a claim that any brand or creator has broken a law. If you are weighing a paid endorsement in a regulated category, read the FTC's current endorsement guides and talk to someone qualified before you post.