TikTok Shop vague price claims: lint caption cues before you burn

TikTok Shop Academy's misleading content examples (last updated 06/25/2026) include vague or unprovable price claims: 'We are having our largest sale!', 'This is the cheapest you'll ever see for this product' and a price on screen that differs from the product detail page. Because Sume burns the text you send as cues without rewording it, you can lint those cues first.

Examples on the page

The page also lists a price comparison joke about a hamburger, which shows the rule reaches comparisons as well as superlatives.

A small linter

The phrase list below is mine, built from the page's examples plus close variants, so extend it with your own. The script drops flagged cues and writes the rest to cues.json, which you can send to the captions endpoint. It runs as written.

import json, re
BAD = [r"largest sale", r"biggest sale", r"cheapest you.ll ever", r"lowest price ever"]
cues = [
    {"text": "Our largest sale!", "start": 0.5, "end": 3},
    {"text": "Now $24.99 through Oct 31", "start": 3, "end": 6},
]
def flagged(text):
    return any(re.search(p, text, re.I) for p in BAD)
for c in cues:
    if flagged(c["text"]):
        print("REVIEW:", c["text"])
keep = [c for c in cues if not flagged(c["text"])]
json.dump({"cues": keep}, open("cues.json", "w"))
print(json.dumps(keep))

Burn what passed

Send the surviving cues with a video_url, a style such as black-outline and a fresh Idempotency-Key to video captions. The job is $0.20 for videos up to 60 seconds. Cues skip speech-to-text, so the burned text equals the approved text.

A script catches phrases, not truth. The price in the cue still has to equal the listing, and the end date has to be real; the sibling posts on rounding and expiry cover both.