Facebook hired a Republican consulting firm to portray its archrival TikTok in a negative light, using a nationwide advocacy campaign to turn the public against it.
Targeted Victory, a right-of-center firm hired by Facebook’s parent company Meta, confirmed to the Washington Examiner on Wednesday that it had planted op-eds, written letters to the editor, and highlighted reporting that was critical of TikTok in the past year in an attempt to emphasize the dangers of using the short-form video platform.
Targeted Victory created a Google document with a series of negative stories titled “Bad TikTok Clips,” and a Victory executive told staff that the firm needed to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using,” according to emails obtained by the Washington Post.
Data privacy and national security concerns regarding TikTok and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, have consistently plagued the platform due to fear of the Chinese government’s access to all data collected by technology companies in China.
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TikTok has already been banned from government devices in a number of agencies, including the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, and the Transportation Security Administration.
The authors of the op-eds and letters to the editor targeting TikTok did not disclose that they worked on behalf of Targeted Victory and Facebook. Targeted Victory also tried to spread stories that highlighted harmful trends and features of TikTok that often first originated on Facebook and were merely replicated by TikTok.
Facebook, which has struggled to compete with TikTok when it comes to young people, saw its active users drop by almost 500,000 at the end of last year.
The social media giant said it supported Targeted Victory’s campaign against TikTok.
“We believe all platforms, including TikTok, should face a level of scrutiny consistent with their growing success,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone told the Washington Post.
Targeted Victory disagreed with the characterization that the firm’s employees who placed the op-eds and letters to the editor had tried to hide their relationship with Meta.
“The story infers that the words of the letters to the editor were not the authors’ own, nor did they know of Meta’s involvement. That is false. They will confirm that. We had hoped to not have them included in this manufactured story out of respect for their personal privacy,” said Zac Moffatt, CEO of Targeted Victory.
Targeted Victory is one of the biggest political consulting firms used by Republican campaigns, earning over $230 million in 2020 with clients including America First Action, the pro-Trump super PAC.
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“These viral stories about TikTok they claim are ‘rumors’ were actually reported by their own newspaper, some from over 6 months ago. We emailed their own reporting!” Moffatt added, referring to Washington Post articles that were critical of TikTok.
