Dirty defamation attack in the social media industry: The Facebook parent company Meta is said to have funded a discrediting campaign against his rival TikTok.
As the Washington Post reports, citing internal emails, Meta hired the consulting firm Targeted Victory to paint TikTok in a bad light. The subsidiary of the Chinese group Bytedance should therefore be presented as a danger to children in the USA and society as a whole.
The video platform is controversial – former US President Donald Trump had tried to impose sanctions on TikTok, but his successor Biden finally overturned them in June 2021. Tiktok is extremely popular among youngsters.
According to the report, Targeted Victory tried, among other things, to place critical letters to the editor and stories about alleged dangerous TikTok trends in US local media. Alleged challenges such as vandalizing schools or hitting teachers were attributed to TikTok, although no such calls were made on the platform. According to the US newspaper, the rumors were first spread on Facebook.
Meta does not deny report
Targeted Victory confirmed when asked to have worked for Meta and did not deny having spread negative information about TikTok.
► The head of the consulting firm close to the conservative Republicans, Zac Moffatt, wrote in the short message service Twitter: “We are proud of our work in highlighting the dangers of TikTok.” In the “Washington Post” report, however, the work is misrepresented.
Alexander of Schoenburg “We need an uprising against Facebook and Co.”
17.02.2022
Meta responded to a request from the AFP news agency with just one sentence: “We think all platforms, including TikTok, should be subject to a review commensurate with their growing success.”
The company under attack itself said in a statement that it was “concerned” that “fomenting” media reports about alleged trends that don’t exist on the video platform could lead to harm in the real world.
TikTok has become a major competitor for Facebook in recent years. According to analysts, the platform was the most downloaded app in 2020, surpassing top dog Facebook and its messaging services Messenger and WhatsApp.
Facebook, on the other hand, has repeatedly had to deal with negative headlines in recent years, among other things because of the protection of privacy and young people as well as the dissemination of hate messages and false information. In October, the internet giant gave itself a new name, Meta.