According to a fresh story from The Washington Post on Wednesday, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has been paying one of the most renowned Republican consulting companies to undertake a statewide effort to sow doubt about one of the business’s main competitors, TikTok.
Targeted Victory is said to have smuggled op-eds and letters to the editor into major local and regional newspapers around the country. According to emails acquired by The Post, a Targeted Victory director advised workers that the company needs to “get the word out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the true threat, especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young kids are using.”
The news of Facebook’s hiring comes only weeks after the business announced that it was losing users for the first time in its 18-year existence. According to Meta’s latest financial report, Facebook’s active users fell by about 500,000 at the end of last year.
Several of Targeted Victory’s op-eds included links to bad news coverage of TikTok, and they were frequently bylined by powerful community members and politicians, including Democrats. According to the Washington Post, none of the articles mentioned their ties to the Facebook-backed business.
Facebook has been chastised by Congress in recent years for purportedly having an unlawful monopoly in the social media business. Internal business documents referenced by senators during a 2020 meeting with internet CEOs, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, suggested that Zuckerberg would go into “destroy mode” if Instagram, a then-nascent competitor, refused to be sold to the social media behemoth.
“It should not be a regular business practice when the dominant platform threatens its prospective rivals,” stated Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) at the time.
