“People have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly. And this is why our focus on Reels is so important over the long-term. As is our work to make sure that our apps are the best services out there for young adults,” Meta chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg said during the firm’s most recent earnings call.
A new report from The Washington Post, however, has shown how far Meta is willing to go to make sure that people came to Meta products and not TikTok to spend their time.
The report alleges that Meta is paying a Republican consulting firm known as Targeted Victory to undermine TikTok. The smear campaign includes placing op-eds and letters in major regional news outlets and promoting stories about nefarious trends on TikTok which reportedly actually originate on Facebook.
One of those trends was known as “devious licks” which saw students vandalising school property. The campaign was so successful that Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote a letter to TikTok in September calling on executives to testify in front of a Senate subcommittee.
The Senator said the app had been, “repeatedly misused and abused to promote behavior and actions that encourage harmful and destructive acts”.
While the trend may have found legs on TikTok, Facebook also served as a sort of staging area with lists regarding what “devious licks” to perform in a given month being circulated on Meta’s platform as detailed in the Reply All podcast.
What makes this whole story so much worse is how Targeted Victory tried to paint Meta as some sort of hero. The agency was reportedly working to get opinion pieces speaking “glowingly of Facebook’s role in, for instance, supporting Black-owned businesses” The Washington Post reported.
While TikTok is not immune to criticism, neither is Meta and frankly, the examples above paint neither platform in a good light. However, Meta paying a company to smear its rival is scummy behaviour. Even worse is Meta using the fact that TikTok is not a US company to sow fears about data sharing with other nations.
Had Meta hoped this campaign would bring more users to its platform we think this report from WaPo will have the opposite effect. Given that Meta is already losing users, we don’t see more flocking to the platform on the back of this news.
