Targeted Victory, which is funded by Meta, has played a rather subtle role in bashing rival TikTok, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. It is reported that the short video sharing service, which has become increasingly popular in recent years, has more than 1 billion monthly active users. But after changing its name to Meta, Facebook has not given up on disparaging competitors, even describing TikTok as a “dangerous and tangible threat” in an internal email.
Targeted Victory’s campaign is said to have involved publishing op-eds on major media outlets, promoting “suspicious stories” related to TikTok to journalists and pushing politicians everywhere to criticize the service.
In order to portray competitors as heinous, the media lobbying campaign also deliberately channelled harmful, teen-targeted social media challenges and attributed such incidents to TikTok, even though the related incidents always appeared on other social networking platforms.
Take, for example, a regional news story from October last year, where Targeted Victory presented a so-called “hit the teacher” challenge that didn’t actually exist on the app.
In response to the malicious slander of competitors, TikTok responded in a statement: “We are deeply concerned that local media reports on so-called trends that do not appear on the platform may cause potential harm to the real world.”
Of course, it’s no surprise to foreign media that Facebook and Targeted Victory have joined forces. In a statement Wednesday, Targeted Victory CEO Zac Moffatt also confirmed the long-term partnership.
Back in 2018, the two parties worked on the Community Boast roadshow and advertising transparency. “As we all know, we have worked with Meta for many years, and Targeted Victory is very proud of our work,” said Moffatt.
Finally, in response to the chaos on social media platforms, some lawmakers have long criticized giants such as TikTok and Meta. So last August, we saw TikTok expand its safety features for teens. Earlier this month, Meta also announced the introduction of new parental controls for Instagram.