Facebook hired company to spread negative stories about TikTok, report says | The Independent

Facebook has been paying a right-wing consulting firm to discredit TikTok, a new report says.According to The Washington Post, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, hired a firm called Targeted Victory to get negative articles and letters about the Chinese app published in major newspapers.According to company emails obtained by the Post, Targeted Victory told its employees 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.”TikTok, owned by the Chinese tech company ByteDance, has emerged as a fierce competitor to Facebook. Last year, TikTok surpassed Facebook and even Google as the world’s most visited website, and the app itself has sometimes garnered more downloads than Facebook or Instagram (also owned by Meta). Meanwhile, Facebook has been haemorrhaging users.So it’s perhaps no wonder that Meta may be taking extreme measures to fight back – but this latest tactic is more typical in politics than in tech. Targeted Victory began as an adviser to Republican candidates, and still receives hundreds of millions of dollars from GOP campaigns. Its CEO, Zac Moffatt, was the digital director for Mitt Romney’s…
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