After Research by the Washington Post Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the country’s largest Republican consulting firms to orchestrate a smear campaign against Chinese app TikTok. “The dream would be to have stories with headlines like ‘From Dance to Danger,'” said one campaign manager.
In the lobby you lie until the beams bend
The campaign against TikTok takes place in many ways: On the one hand, opinion pieces and letters to the editor are to be placed in major news agencies – with the aim of denigrating TikTok and portraying it as a danger to children in the United States. Influencing political reporters and local politicians should also help bring down the big meta competitor. In addition, the company Targeted Victory was hired to spread dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook.
“Beat the teacher” challenge an old wives’ tale
For example, a Google document entitled “Bad TikTok Clips” was circulating internally, which allegedly listed dangerous youth trends circulating on TikTok. Those stories would eventually appear in local newspapers. In the course of the “devious licks” challenge, for example, children and young people would vandalize their school. The challenge even prompted Senator Richard Blumenthal to write a letter to TikTok leadership in September saying the app had been “repeatedly misused to encourage behavior that encourages harmful and destructive acts,” the Democrat said. However, after research by reporter Anna Foley, it came to light that the trend had first spread to Facebook and not TikTok.
In October, rumors about the “Slap a Teacher TikTok challenge” were to be circulated: There was said to have been an incident in Hawaii. In truth, however, the supposedly menacing trend was a free invention – the rumor, in turn, originated on Facebook.
Facebook distracts from the dirt on your own doorstep
One goal of the campaign: Facebook should be staged as the lesser evil against the super villain TikTok. The message needed to be conveyed was that “while Meta is the current sandbag, TikTok is the real threat, largely because it’s a foreign-owned app that’s the #1 data-sharing app that young teens are exposed to.” use,” a director at the company wrote in an email. So the campaign against TikTok should also distract from Meta’s own privacy and antitrust concerns.
Among young people, TikTok outperforms Facebook
However, the slander campaigns cannot be read as mere deception: Last year, whistleblower Frances Haugen published that teenagers spend “two to three times more time” on TikTok than on Instagram and that Facebook’s popularity among young people has fallen sharply . In February, Facebook recorded a decline in users for the first time in its history. In response, Mark Zuckerberg’s company has developed a TikTok clone with Instagram sub-feature Reels. He had told investors that the competitor was a major threat: “People have many options for how they want to spend their time, and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly,” said the CEO.
Founded as a Republican digital consulting firm, Targeted Victory advertises on its website as offering “a right-wing perspective for solving marketing challenges.” Questions asked by the Washington Post went unanswered. However, the company said it has represented Meta for several years and takes pride in the work it does. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone defended the campaign, saying, “We believe all platforms, including TikTok, should face a scrutiny commensurate with their growing success.” A spokesperson for the vilified TikTok said it was “deeply concerned.” ‘ about “fueling local media reports of alleged trends not found on the platform.”