Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is defending its enlistment of a political lobbying firm to plant negative opinion pieces about rival TikTok in U.S. news outlets — as the social giant tried to deflect attention away from its own PR headaches.
The Washington Post on Wednesday reported on Meta’s deal with Targeted Victory, a digital marketing agency that has worked on numerous Republican campaigns. The Post reported that the firm worked with “dozens” of PR firms to “undermine TikTok through a nationwide media and lobbying campaign,” including spreading reports of false rumors about harmful trends supposedly going viral on TikTok. Citing emails from Targeted Victory staffers, the report said Targeted Victory sought to portray TikTok — which is owned by Chinese internet giant ByteDance — as “a danger to American children and society.” Targeted Victory says it employs a “right-of-center perspective to solve marketing challenges.”
Asked to comment on the Targeted Victory campaign, Meta spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement, “We believe all platforms, including TikTok, should face a level of scrutiny consistent with their growing success.”
According to one email cited by the Post, a director at Targeted Victory wrote 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 the report, another Targeted Victory staff member wrote, “Dream would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger: how TikTok has become the most harmful social media space for kids.’”
A TikTok spokesperson said in statement to Variety, “We are deeply concerned that the stoking of local media reports on alleged trends that have not been found on the platform could cause real-world harm.”
TikTok last year said it had more than 1 billion monthly users worldwide — and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, on the company’s Q4 earnings call in February, identified TikTok as major rival. Meta has tried to step up its competition with TikTok its copycat Reels feature for Instagram and Facebook.
“We face a competitor in TikTok that is a lot bigger, so it will take a while to compound and catch up there,” Zuckerberg told analysts. “The thing that is somewhat unique here is that TikTok is so big as a competitor already and also continues to grow at quite a fast rate off of a very large base.”
Some of the narratives Targeted Victory has pushed about TikTok are unfounded, according to the Post report. For example, according to the report, Targeted Victory in October “spread rumors of the ‘Slap a Teacher TikTok challenge’ in local news, touting a local news report on the alleged challenge in Hawaii.” However, there was “no such challenge” on TikTok — and the false reports of the trend originated on Facebook, per an Insider report.
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