Meta Hires Republican Consulting Firm to Smear TikTok in US: Report

Eleven years in the past, Facebook was caught red-handed after it employed a outstanding public relations agency to attempt to plant tales harshly criticizing Google’s privateness practices in main information shops.

In 2018, it employed the PR agency Definers to do opposition analysis on the corporate’s critics, together with billionaire philanthropist George Soros. The firm’s longtime head of communications, Elliot Schrage, took the blame for approving the hiring of Definers and related companies and left Facebook.

On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that Meta, Facebook’s guardian firm, is utilizing related ways to go after one other rival TikTok. Meta, the Post reported, employed a Republican consulting agency referred to as Targeted Victory to “orchestrate a nationwide campaign” towards TikTok.

Targeted Victory, in keeping with the Post, contracted with dozens of public relations companies throughout the US to assist “sway public opinion against TikTok” by planting native information tales and serving to place op-eds concentrating on TikTok across the nation, the story says.

Meta confirmed that it has employed Targeted Victory.

“We believe all platforms, including TikTok, should face a level of scrutiny consistent with their growing success,” spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement.

Zac Moffatt, the CEO of Targeted Victory, said the company “manages bipartisan teams on behalf of our clients.”

“It is public knowledge we have worked with Meta for several years and we are proud of the work we have done,” he mentioned in an announcement.

The Post obtained inner emails from Targeted Victory that outlined a marketing campaign to undermine TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese firm ByteDance. The agency used a mixture of “genuine concerns and unfounded anxieties” about TikTok to be able to attempt to flip public and political sentiment towards it.

According to the report, Targeted Victory was additionally working to get “proactive coverage” about Facebook into native media, together with “submitting letters and opinion pieces speaking glowingly of Facebook’s role in, for instance, supporting Black-owned businesses.”

“We are deeply concerned that the stoking of local media reports on alleged trends that have not been found on the platform could cause real world harm,” TikTok mentioned in an emailed assertion.