Facebook hired Republican lobbyists to slam TikTok
Facebook used an old playbook.
The social media giant reportedly paid a Republican lobbying firm to drum up a nationwide political and media campaign against emerging rival TikTok.
Facebook, now technically known as Meta, hired the lobbyists at Targeted Victory to plant anti-TikTok stories in media outlets with an end goal of local politicians railing against TikTok, the Washington Post reported.
The spurious stories included a TikTok “devious licks” challenge, which actually began on Facebook, and the “slap a teacher” challenge, which didn’t actually exist at all.
Both Facebook, through a spokesman, and Targeted Victory confirmed to the Post that Facebook had hired the firm and it was focused on TikTok.
In one internal email, a Targeted Victory employee said the goal “would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger: how TikTok has become the most harmful social media space for kids,’” according to documents obtained by the Post.
Facebook has been worried about TikTok for years. The company launched its Instagram Reels feature in a clear ripoff of TikTok’s basic content and the two have gone back-and-forth trying to pay the most popular creators.
Despite its dominance across social media, Facebook has use similar schemes in the past. In 2011, the company ran a similar smear campaign against Google, and in 2018 Facebook hired a different lobbying firm to criticize its own critics.
The newest anti-TikTok plan involved searching for “bad” trends on the app and sounding concern alarms in media outlets with influence in local markets, the Post reported. Anti-TikTok opinion pieces, initially crafted by Targeted Victory, appeared earlier this month in the Denver Post and the Des Moines Register.
Facebook was also looking for positive press where possible, according to the Post. The overarching goal was to share a message “that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat.”
Internally, Targeted Victory employees were commended for their work pushing anti-TikTok stories through public relations firms and into local media outlets, the Post reported. The teams that worked on the Denver Post and Des Moines Register stories were invited to share their processes.
TikTok responded to the news in a statement saying it was “deeply concerned” about the Facebook operation.
