Meta Paid GOP Consultants To Smear TikTok As It Lost Teens, Emails Show
In an increasingly desperate bid to reduce the appeal of TikTok, Facebook’s parent company Meta quietly paid a Republican consulting firm to smear the social media rival as a danger to society.
Internal emails obtained by The Washington Post show how Targeted Victory, a GOP strategy group, seeded anti-TikTok stories in local media across the country at the behest of Meta as Meta’s family of apps failed to attract young users.
One email from a Targeted Victory director in February, for instance, instructed operatives to cast TikTok as “the real threat” in social media while Meta is just “the current punching bag.”
Another operative wrote that the “dream would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger: how TikTok has become the most harmful social media space for kids.’”
In addition to questioning the data security of its Chinese-owned competitor, many of the stories sought to blame TikTok for harmful trends that actually originated on Facebook and Instagram.
That includes the so-called “Devious Licks” challenge, for instance, that encouraged students to vandalize school property. Devious Licks spread widely on TikTok and resulted in very real damage across the country, yet actually began on Facebook.
“We are deeply concerned that the stoking of local media reports on alleged trends that have not been found on the platform could cause real world harm,” TikTok told HuffPost in an emailed statement.
A Meta spokesperson told HuffPost the campaign was meant to prompt “scrutiny” of the platform “consistent with their growing success.”
The company did not respond to a more pointed question about the irony of Meta casting TikTok as dangerous to teenagers, considering Meta’s own internal research shows Instagram is highly toxic for that demographic.
The Washington Post revelations align with Meta’s longtime strategy of buyingrivals or, failing that, copying their best features and trying to bully them out of existence.
In 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg attempted to buy TikTok’s predecessor, but, having been rebuffed, set out to cast it as a threat to democracy.
A senior Facebook executive told BuzzFeed News at the time, “Facebook is so pissed that TikTok is the one thing they can’t beat that they’ve turned to geopolitical arguments and lawmakers in Washington to fight their fight.”
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
