Facebook’s parent company Meta has reportedly attempted to sabotage its competitor TikTok by spreading false information indicating the platform is a danger to American children and society.
Internal emails acquired by the Washington Post show that a Republican-affiliated firm called Targeted Victory was working to shift public opinion against TikTok by propagating disinformation saying certain harmful trends originated there, when they actually came from Facebook. One email reportedly shows that Targeted Victory aimed 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.”
Other emails from the company—identified by the Post as “one of the biggest Republican consulting firms” in the U.S.—allegedly discuss ways to push false narratives to local news channels that suggest dangerous trends are putting teens in their communities at risk. “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,’” another internal message is said to have stated.
A spokesperson for Meta defended the company, saying, “We believe all platforms, including TikTok, should face a level of scrutiny consistent with their growing success.”
These emails would say otherwise, with Targeted Victory explicitly pointing to specific trends that it wanted to push in order to spread negative coverage about TikTok, including the “devious licks” challenge, which demonstrated teens vandalizing public property in an effort to go viral. Another negative trend that actually picked up press was the “Slap a Teacher TikTok challenge” that alleged the platform was leading students to harm school faculty. That trend apparently did not actually exist. The firm also demonstrated in other communications its successful attempts to spread anti-TikTok messaging through fake op-eds and letters from concerned parents that have been picked up by local news stations.
The report suggests the main reason behind this attempt at sabotage pertained to TikTok’s foreign ownership. The app was created by the Beijing-based company ByteDance. Targeted Victory also worked to spread positive messaging about Facebook and Meta.
