A report from the Washington Post that surfaced on Wednesday revealed that “Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok.”
In the article, the Washington Post reports that Meta employed the Targeted Victory to redirect blame for harmful trends originating on Facebook towards TikTok, and to portray the Chinese-owned social media company as “a danger to American children and society.”
A director at Targeted Victory wrote in a February email that “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.”
“Bonus point if we can fit this into a broader message that the current bills/proposals aren’t where [state attorneys general] or members of Congress should be focused,” another staffer wrote according to the Washington Post.
Meanwhile, Targeted Victory reportedly also participated in spotlighting Facebook’s obsessive promotion of “Black-owned businesses” and other social justice causes.
Attacking TikTok in the media is also reportedly seen by Meta as a way to deflect antitrust concerns and Congressional investigations into politically-motivated censorship at Facebook, which many experts believe have contributed significantly to Facebook’s stalled user growth, decline in popularity among young people, and declining stock market value.
“Bonus point if we can fit this into a broader message that the current bills/proposals aren’t where [state attorneys general] or members of Congress should be focused,” another Targeted Victory staffer wrote according to the Washington Post.
The news comes after Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that Meta Facebook, provided customer data to hackers who masqueraded as law enforcement officials. Data such as customer addresses, phone numbers and IP addresses, were turn over to the hackers in mid-2021 in response to forged “emergency data requests.
