Meta Hired Republican Firm To Turn Public Opinion Against Competitor TikTok
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Facebook parent company Meta took another public blow Wednesday after an investigation revealed that the social media giant employed prominent Republican consulting firm Targeted Victory in its efforts to soil public perception of competing social media platform TikTok.
According to internal emails obtained by The Washington Post, Meta paid Targeted Victory to craft an anti-TikTok campaign that included promoting stories focused on dangerous trends that supposedly spawned on the platform, crafting editorials that furthered those claims that ran in major news services and developing a roster of local political figures to help push those narratives. The firm partnered with “dozens of public relations firms across the United States” to build an offensive against the app as Meta platforms struggled to combat its rapid growth.
One such letter to the editor signed by the chair of a local Democratic political action committee that appeared in the Des Moines Register on March 12 included links to the same negative stories promoted by Targeted Victory. An email from a Targeted Victory director lauded having the official’s name attached to the letter, saying it “will carry a lot of weight with legislators and stakeholders.” The director encouraged other firm partners to employ the same strategy to extend the effort in the same email. A similar letter ran in the Denver Post that same day.
A number of the stories promoted by Targeted Victory focused on social media challenges that were characterized as endangering American Youth. Key among those was the “Devious Licks” trend that made national headlines thanks to videos of students supposedly stealing items from schools growing in popularity. Targeted Victory collected questionable stories focused on dangerous trends that supposedly generated on TikTok, including the “Devious Licks” videos, in a Google document appropriately named “Bad TikTok Clips” and used that document to push reports on “Devious Licks” to local outlets in multiple states and Washington, D.C.