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Facebook Paid GOP Firm To Malign TikTok (washingtonpost.com) 101

Posted by msmash from the no-stone-left-unturned dept.
Several readers have shared this report: Employees with the firm, Targeted Victory, worked to undermine TikTok through a nationwide media and lobbying campaign portraying the fast-growing app, owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance, as a danger to American children and society, according to internal emails shared with The Washington Post. Targeted Victory needs 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," a director for the firm wrote in a February email. Campaign operatives were also encouraged 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.

The emails, which have not been previously reported, show the extent to which Meta and its partners will use opposition-research tactics on the Chinese-owned, multibillion-dollar rival that has become one of the most downloaded apps in the world, often outranking even Meta's popular Facebook and Instagram apps. In an internal report last year leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen, Facebook researchers said teens were spending "2-3X more time" on TikTok than Instagram, and that Facebook's popularity among young people had plummeted. In one email, a Targeted Victory 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." In other emails, Targeted Victory urged partners to push stories to local media tying TikTok to dangerous teen trends in an effort to show the app's purported harms. "Any local examples of bad TikTok trends/stories in your markets?" a Targeted Victory staffer asked.
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Facebook Paid GOP Firm To Malign TikTok

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  • Time to stop pretending that Facebook isn't catering to the far-right extremists in this country. They will lie about it of course, they will tell you that facts aren't real, and that in fact Facebook is 'progressive' and 'woke'

    That's how you know you're talking to a liar or a charlatan

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mmell ( 832646 )
      There you have it folks - straight from the keyboard of an alt-right pinko commie snowflake.
      Facebook/Meta sucks. No doubt. Zuckerberg is as big a criminal as I've ever seen come down the pike - but he isn't a right-wing Christian conservative with delusions of humanity.
      Why do you hate America so much?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kunwon1 ( 795332 )
        Is this response generated by some kind of markov chain algorithm? Doesn't seem to make much sense

        • Is this response generated by some kind of markov chain algorithm? Doesn't seem to make much sense

          Best retort ever. I'm stealing it!

      • Zuckerberg is as big a criminal as I've ever seen come down the pike - but he isn't a right-wing Christian conservative with delusions of humanity.

        Not a Christian, no. The rest is accurate. But this has been studied, and Faceboot and Twatter alike both censor more liberal content than conservative. e.g. https://www.valleycentral.com/... [valleycentral.com]

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by wiggles ( 30088 )

          Baloney.

          And per your link, they've investigated themselves and found they are the victim? Seems to be going around. Everybody's a victim these days.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by kunwon1 ( 795332 )
            'Baloney' says the person who doesn't have any evidence to provide or any counter-arguments at all

            Why don't you say what you mean? You are posting based on personal beliefs and emotions, and you don't care about facts

            If that's not the case, why don't you present some actual evidence for your absurd theories?

          • Here's the actual paper with sources and data. https://cdn.cms-twdigitalasset... [cms-twdigitalassets.com]

            But you certainly aren't going to read that.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by wiggles ( 30088 )

              Of course I won't read it. It's so laughably biased as to be worth more as toilet paper.

              • Which you know without reading it because of who wrote it, which is Ad Hominem again. shock. amazement.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by trawg ( 308495 )

                Of course I won't read it. It's so laughably biased as to be worth more as toilet paper.

                how did you determine it was biased without having read it?

                you've made up your mind before you've read it because you're scared it might reveal information that conflicts with your world view and you'll have to resolve your cognitive dissonance

                don't worry about it dude - just read it and if it turns out you're wrong, you can embrace it as having learned something

                if you find holes in their arguments you can send them and email and correct the record, or write your own superior paper

          • Hey! Stop victimizing drinkypoo. He can't help it his parents gave him a shit name.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Regarding "but he isn't a right-wing Christian conservative "

        He just makes a lot of money from them. Which I believe was the point of the post.

    • FB's upper management is overall libertarian, not conservative. This is why they tick off both groups. They don't want gov't interfering in their content, including marketing-oriented snooping. They don't care if their customers are hippies, communists, LGBTQ, or Nazis; as long they provide ad revenue.

      They used the conservative marketing firm because it had experience bashing China, which FB felt was the best way to slow TikTok: associate it with China in lawmaker's minds. It probably was a monetary decisio

    • Did you see what Facebook did to the Hunter Biden laptop story?

      And how the NY Times just acknowledged it actually happened ?

      https://www.nytimes.com/2022/0... [nytimes.com]

      • Stop trying to make Hunter Biden "happen."

        He's never going to happen. No one cares... and you didn't either, when Trump and his family did worse shit.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tragedy ( 27079 )

        Can you explain what the Hunter Biden laptop story actually is? What relevant takeaway is there from it? The whole thing has always sounded a bit weird on the face of it. I had always assumed a fairly high probability that the data on the laptop was real, but hacked and the laptop story was a ruse to sanitize it. If that's not the case and it really was his actual laptop, how does that work from a legal standpoint? I mean, I get that abandoned property is a thing and users of that computer repair shop might

    • Tell me you live in a leftist mental prison, without telling me you live in a leftist mental prison.
    • TFA is propaganda: This has nothing to do with the GOP. According to TFA, "The firm is one of the biggest recipients of Republican campaign spending". The firm is a hired gun who will falsify the truth for whoever pays it, be it Republican, Democratic, Facebook, etc. The fact that Republican campaigns are its largest source of income is reputational only, not loyalty. A firm that will lie and distort truth has no loyalty to anything but money. There are similar firms used primarily by the Democratic Party,
  • There is plenty of bipartisan reasons to malign TicTok and try to push the public to shun it.

    The Communist Chinese govt's control and access through this app should be enough to scare the shit out of both parties in the US.

    • The US govt's control and access through Facebook/Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Apple should be enough to scare the shit out of every country in Europe.

    • > The Communist Chinese govt's control and access through this app should be enough to scare the shit out of both parties in the US.

      CCP has banned woke and challenge content in China, promoting feats of masculinity and STEM videos there.

      Tiktok amplifies that banned content in America. If you* don't understand that everything in China is "dual-use" then you're going to lose.

      China plays a long game and a zero-sum game. They can afford to take decades to destroy the next generation of Americans. They hav

    • I would go even further - there is plenty of universal reasons to shun it. Moral, financial, data - you name it.

      None of these are available to F***book period. When F***book pays for a PR campaign to slander a competitor this is a competition matter, not moral, bipartisan, universal or whatever else.

      The more interesting question here is who and how much did Facebook suck off for this to remain off the competition watchdog radars.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dstwins ( 167742 )
      Given its a social media site and should never be used for news or anything approaching private communications, means its ownership is not a factor..

      Now if it were say, Google, which processes (and scans) billions of emails, has massive ad reach and controls which ads are shown, as well as aggregates news feeds (which means it could be selective on news streams that are favorable to a point near and dear to itself and its aligned governments.. THEN sure.. the government that has oversight on it is of a conc

      • Given its a social media site and should never be used for news

        But apparently, and sadly...it is being used for news.

        TikTok is a provider to the pipeline and does little to cull its content

        I seriously doubt that...they are using algo's to decide what you see next too.

    • While true this is more about Facebook paying someone to bash their competition, just another in a long list of reasons not to go anywhere near their products. This is usually tip of the iceberg stuff, how many smaller companies have these guys sent the dogs after?

  • It's a pity the three of them can't lose

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mmell ( 832646 )
      I know - you'd much rather they channeled someone you respect, like say, Breznev or Kruschev.
      But you're right about one thing - if they're channeling Henry Kissinger, they can't lose! Even now that he's dead, I'll bet Henry Kissinger is still way smarter than you. Just sayin'.
  • Of course the kids don't use Facebook, that's where their parents and other family members are. TikTok is the new hotness and FB is terrified of becoming the next MySpace.

    • First D&D was evil, but then they forgot about it because of Harry Potter. Now they've forgotten about Harry Potter because of TikTok. The question is what will parents hate next to displace TikTok in the evil-o-meter?

  • Facebook/Meta isn't a danger to American children and society.

    Considering how much Facebook/Meta cowtows to China and other dictators, this isn't even the pot calling the kettle black.

  • For those who do not remember history, check this Slashdot story: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/08/07/1951233/why-we-have-a-tiktok-problem [slashdot.org]
    TLDR: Vine was around before Tiktok. FB helped kill Vine. Now we have tiktok.

  • Headline: "Company tries to subvert its rival" news at 11?

    I think it's even more curious that WaPo doesn't just attack this completely-pedestrian thing by itself, but identifies the media firm as a "GOP" firm. Maybe they should just put a Trump wig on their logo in the picture?

    Targeted Victory is indeed a conservative-leaning media firm (formed by ex-Romney campaigners after 2012), but I'd guess that FB probably can't get anyone else to reliably work for them without being rife with leaks to the woke pres

    • I think that the message behind headline is that most of the things you see spreading online and even leading to news articles are not grassroots posts that came about by normal users. That most of what was spreading was done with intention and planned. It makes little difference in the end. But it's effectively paid-for whataboutism to deflect Facebook. I don't really trust Facebook any more than I do ByteDance.

      • Stupid question: why would anyone have EVER "trusted" a massive megacorp to do anything but serve its own interests? If FB could derive the electronic form of nicotine (and maybe serving us bias-affirming ads is exactly that) they OF COURSE would do so...so would Twitter, Instagram, Ford, NYT, and both political parties.

        Not to be blunt but...duh?

        • It's not about trusting the corp. It's about trusting the posts of what you thought are ordinary people.

  • While TikTok is an obnoxious shit-stain of an app, that's on parents for letting their kids use it. You wouldn't blame the liquor companies if parents were sending their kids to school drunk.

    The irony is that Facebook's anti-TikTok actions are likely to backfire on them, as lawmakers only hear "think of the children!" and will just declare a jihad on all social media - including Facebook.

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