A report by The Washington Post revealed that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, paid a consulting firm to run a campaign to turn the public against TikTok. The firm, Targeted Victory, is one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the United States—and its campaign operatives were even encouraged to use TikTok’s prominence as a way to deflect from Meta’s own privacy and antitrust concerns.
The anti-TikTok campaign included placing op-eds and letters to editors in major American news outlets. They used them to push dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, as well as pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down TikTok.
“[Targeted Victory needs to] get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign-owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using,” wrote a director for Targeted Victory in an email.
If you’re not familiar with TikTok, it’s only just one of the most popular downloadable apps—if not the most popular app right now with 656 million downloads in 2021. It’s essentially a short-video app that records and streams clips ranging in length from 15 seconds to 10 minutes. You can even learn more about its influence on the world in my feature. Basically, it’s a pretty big deal, beating all of Meta’s apps in downloads—and it would explain why Meta isn’t happy.
Targeted Victory is one of the biggest firms for Republican political campaigns. It has reportedly also represented Meta for several years and is “proud of the work” they have done. The firm urged partners to push stories to local media tying TikTok to dangerous teen trends in an effort to show the app’s purported harms. Other efforts include trying to get headlines out there like “how TikTok has become the most harmful social media space for kids”.
In 2020, then President Trump even attempted to ban TikTok in the U.S. while seeking to get TikTok into the hands of a U.S. company—seeing as the platform is Chinese-owned. However, the White House appeared to have lost interest in TikTok, and President Joe Biden revoked it last year.
The news of Meta paying for a smear campaign against TikTok came a few weeks after the company declared that it was losing users for the first time in its 18-year history. The platform had lost one million daily active users in a span of three months.
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