Why You Keep Failing on TikTok: Cloaking Differences Across Networks

I see this exact scenario play out weekly on Afflift. A media buyer spends six months perfecting his cloaking setup on Meta (Facebook). He is running aggressive Crypto funnels through a premium Agency Account smoothly.

He decides it's time to scale laterally to TikTok. He copies his entire funnel exactly. He points his TikTok ads to the exact same cloaker link.

Within 45 minutes, his TikTok account is permanently banned, and his remaining prepaid funds are locked.

He posts an angry thread blaming the cloaker software. But the software didn't fail. He failed to understand that Tier 1 ad networks do not use the same review mechanisms.

The Meta (Facebook) Protocol

Meta relies heavily on automated, upfront bot checks. When you publish an ad, their scraping bots deploy globally to map the DOM of your intended URL. The name of the game on Meta is pure technical evasion.

Meta's AI is looking for specific JavaScript signatures, known bad domains, and Canvas fingerprint mismatches. If your cloaker (like Adspect) successfully identifies the headless bot and serves it a compliant, boring WordPress e-commerce store (the Safe Page), you usually pass the initial review phase.

Meta relies on user reports and CTR spikes to manually review ads later.

The TikTok Gauntlet

TikTok operates on a fundamentally different, significantly more aggressive philosophy. Because TikTok is inherently a mobile, video-first platform, their review process is heavily weighted toward Human Manual Review.

1. The Mobile Sandbox

When you submit an ad on TikTok, their automated systems don't just send a headless browser to your link. They route the destination URL through a heavily sandboxed, emulated mobile environment.

Many middle-tier cloakers fail here because they assume any mobile device is a human target. The cloaker sees an "iPhone 14" pinging the link from California, assumes it's safe, and serves the aggressive Crypto Money Page.

However, that "iPhone 14" is actually an employee at TikTok's review center running an emulation. The human reviewer sees the Crypto page, smashes the ban button, and your account dies.

2. The Video-to-Page Congruence Check

TikTok manual reviewers are fanatical about congruence.

If your TikTok video creative is a dynamic, fast-paced hook featuring a girl talking about a "secret new financial app," and the cloaker serves the reviewer a Safe Page about "The History of Gardening," the alarm bells ring instantly.

A Meta bot might see the gardening page, tick the "no policy violations found" box, and let it live. A TikTok human reviewer immediately recognizes the disconnect. They know you are hiding the real page. Ban.

The Strategy for TikTok Cloaking

If you want to survive TikTok's manual review process in 2026, you must adjust your infrastructure:

1. Paranoia Mode on the Cloaker: If you are using a tool found on AdAccountsHub, you must slide the traffic filtering settings to maximum paranoia for TikTok campaigns. You must aggressively filter out Datacenter IPs, ISP proxies, and any known VPN ranges, forcing the system to only show the Money page to absolutely verified, unquestionable mobile ISP connections.
2. Hyper-Congruent Decoys: Your Safe Page must look exactly like the app or product presented in the video creative, minus any restricted claims. It has to pass a human sanity check.
3. Approve, Then Switch: The oldest trick still works best on TikTok. Drive your initial traffic directly to a 100% compliant, white-hat Safe Page without the cloaker engaged. Wait for the campaign to go "Active" and start spending. Only after you have cleared the manual hurdle do you engage the cloaker script backend to start routing real users to the Money Page.