Facebook parent Meta has hired Republican consulting firm Targeted Victory in the US for a nationwide campaign against Tiktok. This reported the Washington Post on Wednesday. Accordingly, Meta was about turning the public and politicians against Tiktok to distract from problems at Meta.
The nationwide campaign should the report of Washington Post after influence politics and the public in such a way that the Tiktok app of the Chinese operating company Bytedance is perceived as a danger to US children and society. As the newspaper claims to have learned from emails leaked to it, the message was to be conveyed that while Meta “is the current sandbag, Tiktok poses the real threat”. The app is foreign-owned and is “the number 1 for sharing data” among young teenagers.
influencing politics and the public
Specifically, Meta intended to distract from its own data protection and antitrust problems. Meta is said to have aimed to steer the current regulatory efforts of the US supervisory authority Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and draft legislation in progress in a different direction and to present Tiktok as the actual threat. In addition, the campaign aimed to distract attention from the harms of using Facebook and Instagram on children and young people, which Meta knew about and which had been brought to light by whistleblower Frances Haugen in September 2021.
In order to achieve this, according to the Washington Post Opinion pieces and letters to the editor about the most important news agencies in the USA as well as “dubious stories about alleged Tiktok trends” are distributed. Targeted Victory encouraged its partners to send examples of bad Tiktok trends and negative influences of the app to local media. Within the company, Targeted Victory is said to have collected a link list under the title “Bad Tiktok Clips” with news reports from local media in order to send them to partners who should use them to put pressure on the legislature.
This is supposed to be loud Washington Post For example, they have also had success with the “devious licks” trend, in which students steal school property and then post the stolen items on Tiktok. Local media picked up the list of links to the “Bad Tiktok Clips” that had been launched and triggered reports in several US states. Attorney Generals of several US states are currently examining the harmful effects Tiktok has on young people. However, research by Anna Foley of podcast network Gimlet suggests the “devious licks” were first seen on Facebook, not Tiktok.
According to the newspaper report, in this case, as in other cases, Targeted Victory tried to disguise being the author of the opinion articles and letters to the editor. In none of the cases was it evident that action had been taken on behalf of Meta. A company spokesman for Meta wanted to address the allegations against the Washington Post did not comment, but pointed out that emerging platforms such as Tiktok should be subjected to scrutiny. Tiktok expressed concern about the campaign.
Expensive lobbying
US consulting firm Targeted Victory was founded in 2012 as a Republican digital consulting firm that receives the majority of its campaign spending from Republicans. In 2020 alone, 237 million US dollars flowed to the company, according to a compilation of Watch Dogs OpenSecrets. According to the newspaper report, Meta and Facebook have maintained a business relationship with Targeted Victory for several years.
The group used various specialists for various challenges, such as the “Cambridge Analytica” scandal, in order to influence the public and politics in the desired direction. This costs Meta a lot: OpenSecrets found out that around 20 million dollars went to lobbying at the federal level in the USA in 2021.
(olb)
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