Facebook’s Secret Attack on TikTok

Facebook is paying the largest Republican media firm in the country to launch a coordinated attack against TikTok by planting misleading stories and negative op-eds claiming that TikTok is dangerous, and promoting made up TikTok trends like “slap a teacher challenge” that don’t actually exist. 

In other words, convincing baby boomers who watch local news that their children are at risk by using this app, and turning that negative public opinion into actual investigations and legislation. Hi, I’m Taylor Lorenz from the Washington Post here for Good Morning, Bad News to talk about this story I broke with reporter Drew Harwell, exposing Facebook’s behind-the-scenes anti-TikTok campaign. 

Since last fall we’ve been looking into strange and dubious stories popping up in local news nationwide about the “dangers of TikTok” that reference nonexistent or overblown trends, and that have led to real-world repercussions, like school closures and even an investigation by a coalition of state attorneys general. In our research, we gained access to undisclosed emails and documents between Facebook’s parent company Meta and Targeted Victory, one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the United States. 

These documents show a coordinated and secret campaign to undermine TikTok’s growth by promoting the narrative that using TikTok leads to dangerous behavior by teens, and that the app itself is potentially collecting behavioral data about children, and sending that data to China. Don’t get me wrong, there are legitimate privacy and moderation concerns with TikTok. But the purpose of this targeted lobbying campaign was to use Facebook-friendly political reporters and local politicians to draw attention to, or outright fabricate negative stories about TikTok, and then use this manufactured public reaction to lobby state and federal officials into taking action against TikTok. And it’s obviously not a coincidence that while TikTok is the fastest growing social media app ever, Facebook just lost users this year for the first time in its history. 

And these underhanded attacks are just one of the ways the company is trying to maintain its relevance, while simultaneously creating a virtual clone of TikTok, Instagram Reels, for their own platform. In fact, some of the accusations made against TikTok were not only false, but originated on Facebook. One local news story promoted by Targeted Victory in Hawaii alleged that TikTok was hosting a, quote “Slap a Teacher challenge”. This challenge not only didn’t exist, but the rumor that it did came from an unsourced and obviously false Facebook post. 

Targeted Victory used dozens of local public relations firms to plant similar stories, as well as negative op-eds in key congressional districts. And all of this was intentionally done behind the scenes, making clear efforts to distance themselves from their work. In one email, a Targeted Victory director asked for ideas on local political reporters who could serve as a “back channel” for anti-TikTok messaging, saying the firm “would definitely want it to be hands off.” 

Other emails from Targeted Victory noted that they need 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.” This sort of fear mongering around social media isn’t new. Facebook is well acquainted with it after their privacy violations and political manipulation during the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and subsequent antitrust investigation - and during all of these scandals Facebook worked with different right-leaning consultancy firms to attack and discredit their critics, and other tech companies, while spending tens of millions of dollars every year lobbying Congress to pass legislation in their favor. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, outspends all but six of the nation’s biggest companies and industry groups in federal lobbying, paying more than $20 million just last year. 

Meanwhile, Targeted Victory has been a long-time advisor for Facebook, and is also one of the biggest Republican consulting firms, receiving nearly a quarter billion dollars from Republicans in 2020, with the largest payments coming from national GOP congressional committees and America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC. These bare-knuckle tactics and opposition-research are commonplace in the world of politics, but have become increasingly noticeable within a tech industry where companies vie for cultural relevance, at a time when Facebook is under pressure to win back young users who are abandoning the platform in droves. 

But these tactics come with a price. Fear mongering and misinformation designed to manipulate older and not-tech savvy adults into creating conflict with their children, or students, over the apps they use, just for the sake of increasing market share for another social media app is abhorrent. 

Facebook is arguably one of the biggest privacy violators and behavioral manipulators in the social media space, and yet their market share is rising among older adults who fear those exact things happening on TikTok. Of course TikTok isn’t blissfully innocent or lacking in bad and unhealthy trends, but conflating that real criticism with completely made up news stories based on unsourced Facebook posts, propagated by the biggest Republican media operative firm in the country, is much more harmful and dangerous than a devious lick or two.