Facebook parent company Meta hired one of the biggest Republican consulting firms to arrange an anti-TikTok nationwide campaign, The Washington Post reported.
The firm Targeted Victory worked to damage TikTok through a media and lobbying campaign portraying the app as a danger to American children and society, according to internal emails shared with the Post.
The firm worked to use both genuine concerns and unfounded anxieties to cast doubt about the popular app, the newspaper said.
TikTok, owned by China-based company ByteDance, is Facebook's biggest competitor, especially in terms of young users.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told the Post that the company believed "all platforms, including TikTok, should face a level of scrutiny consistent with their growing success."
The effort to malign TikTok employed tactics often used in political campaigns – opinion columns and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets; promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that originated on Facebook; and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down the app, the Post reported.
In one email, a firm director asked for ideas on local political reporters who could serve as a "back channel" for anti-TikTok messages, saying the firm "would definitely want it to be hands off," the Post said.
A Targeted Victory staffer wrote that a "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,'" the Post reported.
One Targeted Victory director in February 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," the Post reported.
An internal report leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen said Facebook researchers last year found that teens were spending "2-3X more time" on TikTok than Meta's Instagram, and that Facebook's popularity among young people had plummeted, the Post said.
The campaign also aimed to use TikTok's prominence as a way to deflect from Meta's own privacy and antitrust concerns.
"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," a Targeted Victory staffer wrote in one email, the Post reported.
The Post said that Targeted Victory also worked to get "proactive coverage" about Facebook into local newspapers, radio segments, and TV broadcasts. That included opinion pieces crediting Facebook for its role in such endeavors as supporting Black-owned businesses.
Targeted Victory was launched as a Republican digital consulting firm by Zac Moffatt, a digital director for Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign.
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