What impact does Meta have on US politicians in their fight against Tiktok?

The Tiktok Congressional hearing has sparked a firestorm of contrasting viewpoints on the perspectives of the two sides. Many Americans voiced disappointment and frustration over the lawmakers’ arguments and questions, which revealed their ignorance of technology, social media, and Tiktok, making their speech a laughing stock for viewers. Many people are wondering why the US Congress only targets Tiktok while potential concerns about violent challenges, images of firearms, privacy or security are “not unique to” Tiktok as its CEO stated in the hearing. These are prevalent on all other social media platforms. In fact, Tiktok, in contrast to Facebook, and many other social networks, has demonstrated that it has better controls against violent and bad content, especially when it can direct people to a safe page after they show their negative thoughts or intentions. What motivated these politicians?

Many have traced back to The Washington Post and The Independent in about Facebook (changed into Meta at present) hiring a Consulting firm to spread negative stories against Tiktok. Let’s review the main analyses these papers cover.

According to The Washington Post, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has hired the biggest Republican consulting firm, Targeted Victory, to orchestrate a nationwide campaign aimed at turning the public against TikTok, its biggest competitor. The campaign includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor. These bare-knuckle tactics, long commonplace in the world of politics, have become increasingly noticeable within a tech industry where companies vie for cultural relevance and come at a time when Facebook is under pressure to win back young users.

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According to an internal email shared with The Washington Post, employees with the firm 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. In the email, 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”.

Campaign operatives were also encouraged to use TikTok’s prominence as a way to deflect from Meta’s own privacy and antitrust concerns. 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.

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. 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”. Another email urged partners to push for stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger: how TikTok has become the most harmful social media space for kids.

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Targeted Victory worked to amplify negative TikTok coverage through a Google document titled “Bad TikTok Clips,” which was shared internally and included links to dubious local news stories citing TikTok as the origin of dangerous teen trends. Local operatives working with the firm were encouraged to promote these alleged TikTok trends in their own markets to put pressure on lawmakers to act. One trend Targeted Victory sought to enhance through its work was the “devious licks” challenge, which showed students vandalizing school property. Through the “Bad TikTok Clips” document, the firm pushed stories about the “devious licks” challenge in local media across Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

According to an investigation by Anna Foley at the podcast network Gimlet, rumors of the “devious licks” challenge initially spread on Facebook, not TikTok. In October, Targeted Victory worked to spread rumors of the “Slap a Teacher TikTok challenge” in local news, touting a local news report on the alleged challenge in Hawaii. In reality, no such challenge existed on TikTok. Again, the rumor started on Facebook, according to a series of Facebook posts first documented by Insider.

This campaign, when exposed by the Washington Post, caused a series of harsh reactions from the public and Tiktok users. Therefore, after the Tiktok congressional hearing with a lot of details taken from Meta’s antitiktok campaign, many people had doubts about Meta’s influence on lawmakers to ban Tiktok.

Many Tiktokers expressed their disappointment on the lawmakers’ performance at the hearing and said that they would not use Facebook again even if Tiktok was banned. Some influencers have spoken out against the lawmakers’ request to ban Tiktok or even organized minor protests.

At present, we are unable to determine whether Meta’s influence on politicians’ decisions to ban Tiktok was significant, but the fact that Facebook hired Targeted Victory to launch campaigns to harm TikTok is difficult to justify. It appears that many people would still opt out of Facebook whether Tiktok is banned or not, not just because they support Tiktok but also because Facebook no longer appeals to them.

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