Facebook paid Republican lobbyists to smear TikTok | Technology

In one of the emails, it can be read: “The ideal would be to get [los medios] write stories with headlines like ‘From dance to danger: how TikTok has become the most harmful social network for children’. In another, the sender asks for “negative examples at the local level” of stories or trends related to the Chinese platform for short videos, which has enormous influence among teenagers. Both are emails interns sent to their workers by one of the consultants of lobbying The most powerful Republican-affiliated networks in the United States, called Targeted Victory, which was paid by Meta (Silicon Valley company formerly known as Facebook) to exert public pressure and concoct a negative publicity campaign against TikTok in newspapers and televisions across the country. , according to research published this Wednesday by The Washington Post, journal that has had access to those messages.

Lobbyist Targeted Victory’s mission was to get op-eds and letters to the editor published in major regional media outlets, as well as engage influential reporters and local politicians in disseminating stories casting doubt on the negative effects of using the Chinese company, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance. Effects for which the social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg has been blamed in the past. The apps of TikTok, one of the most downloaded on the planet, has become the greatest threat, especially in the younger age groups, for the two jewels of Meta: Facebook and Instagram.

These practices, perfectly legal, are commonplace in US political campaigns, during which television and newspapers are filled with advertisements paid for by the parties in which little room is left to the imagination in order to denigrate the contrary. They were not so common until now in the fight between the big technology companies.

Targeted Victory, which has been representing Meta for several years and did not respond to emails from this newspaper this Wednesday, defines itself as an “agency focused primarily on digital created for the mobile age,” which works at the “intersection of politics and business” with a “centre-right perspective.” “Our teams can be deployed on the ground anywhere in the country within 48 hours, acting from the local to the national scale. (…) We produce content in the format in which people want to consume it. Our designers specialize in short creative videos designed for mobile devices”, can be read in the declaration of intent on their website.

The consultancy, whose headquarters are in Arlington, a neighboring town of Washington, on the other side of the Potomac River, is the ninth firm dedicated to political pressure (lobbying) that raised the most money (more than 237 million dollars, about 212 million euros ) during the 2020 campaign, according to the records of OpenSecrets, an independent agency dedicated to monitoring relations between economic and political power in the federal capital. The list of its best clients includes the Republican committees of the United States Congress and Senate, as well as America First Policies, an entity founded in 2017 and associated with the campaigns of Donald Trump.

Facebook did not react immediately to EL PAÍS’s request this Wednesday either. On Washington PostAndy Stone, one of its spokesmen, defends the campaign: “We believe that all platforms, including TikTok, should be subjected to a level of scrutiny commensurate with their growing success.”

In the documents leaked in the fall by the deep Throat Facebook, former employee Frances Haugen, already guessed the social network’s concern about the threat posed by the Chinese platform, which, according to one of those papers, made teenagers spend “two or three times more time” on it than in the apps owned by Zuckerberg. In those days, the world was able to access through the media the content of tens of thousands of documents that spoke of how Facebook does not care that political confrontation is encouraged or spread anti-vaccine hoaxes rather than lose the interest of its users. Also, how their managers knew that what they offer, especially on Instagram, leads 13% of adolescent girls to suicidal thoughts and anorexia. Technology journalist Alex Heath, who writes in TheVergethen defined the worst evil that stalks the platform as “a self-sustaining decline, due to the aging of the Facebook population.”

“An extra point if we can manage to place [las historias sobre TikTok] as part of a broader argument that makes it clear the current bills/proposals are not where members of Congress should focus,” says another of the emails released by The Washington Post. The newspaper, owned by the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, recounts several cases of letters to the director, published in media such as the Denver Post or the Des Moines Register, in which parents dismayed by the influence of TikTok on their children warn about its dangers and demand that legislators take action on the matter.

Unlike what happens with television advertisements for electoral campaigns, in which it is clear who is behind it, none of the opinion pieces that Targeted Victory managed to place let readers know that their publication was sponsored by a consulting firm. paid by Meta.

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