Meta knows its longstanding social media dominance is waning, and it’s not averse to playing dirty in defense of its title. As a new exclusive from The Washington Post published earlier today showcases, internal company emails from a GOP consulting firm hired by Facebook detail the lengths to which the Team Zuckerberg is willing to go to smear its biggest competitor, TikTok.
As recently as February, directors within the PR firm, Targeted Victory, tasked workers with “get[ting] 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.” Of course, it didn’t matter that evidence offered to local and regional outlets regarding problematic viral trends — such as the “Devious Licks” challenge daring students to vandalize school property — often originated from Facebook first and not TikTok.
