Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok
Last edited Wed Mar 30, 2022, 09:11 AM - Edit history (1)
Source: Washington Post
Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok. 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. Employees with the firm, Targeted Victory, 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, according to internal emails shared with The Washington Post.
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,” a director for the firm wrote in a February email. Campaign operatives were also encouraged to use TikTok’s prominence as a way to deflect from Meta’s own privacy and antitrust concerns. “Bonus point if we can fit this into a broader message that the current bills/proposals aren’t where [state attorneys general] or members of Congress should be focused,” a Targeted Victory staffer wrote.
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. In an internal report last year leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen, Facebook researchers said teens were spending “2-3X more time” on TikTok than Instagram, and that Facebook’s popularity among young people had plummeted.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/facebook-tiktok-targeted-victory/
Ironically, my friends and family "claim" they were on Fakebook because of "their kids" (outside of them wanting to touch base with their old buddies). But it's not the kids there, it's often their teachers who were initially putting announcements and other stuff on that platform. The kids don't use it and consider it "the old people's app".
ETA - I found this article from just over 3 years ago that mentioned when this apparently first happened -
Taylor Hatmaker@tayhatmaker / 7:58 AM EST•November 30, 2018
Facebook is still reeling from the revelation that it hired an opposition research firm with close ties to the Republican party, but its relationship with Definers Public Affairs isn’t the company’s only recent contract work with deeply GOP-linked strategy firms. While that work alone isn’t cause for controversy, Facebook’s work with Republican groups does call into question the ongoing narrative that Facebook operates with an anti-conservative bias.
According to sources familiar with the project, Facebook also contracted with Targeted Victory, described as “the GOP’s go-to technology consultant firm.” Targeted Victory worked with Facebook on the company’s Community Boost roadshow, a tour of U.S. cities meant to stimulate small business interest in Facebook as a business and ad platform. The ongoing Community Boost initiative, announced in late 2017, kicked off earlier this year with stops in cities like and Topeka, Kansas and Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Facebook also worked with Targeted Victory on the company’s ad transparency efforts. Over the last year, Facebook has attempted to ward off regulation from Congress over ad disclosure, even putting forth some self-regulatory efforts to appease legislators. Specifically, it has dedicated considerable lobbying resources to slow any progress from the Honest Ads Act, a piece of legislature that would force the company to make retain copies of election ads, disclose spending and more. Targeted Victory, a digital strategy and marketing firm, is not a registered lobbyist for Facebook on any work relating to ad transparency.
Targeted Victory
On his company biography page, Targeted Victory founder and CEO Zac Moffatt describes his experience helping companies “enhance their brand and get their message out in the current political and media environment,” mentioning Facebook, FedEx and Gillette as corporate clients. The bio page appears to be one of the only public mentions of his work with Facebook and the company was not mentioned alongside Gillette and FedEx on his Linkedin page.
(snip)
https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/30/facebook-targeted-victory-definers-gop/
I suppose while all-eyes were on Cambridge Analytica overseas, this was going on right here in the good old U.S.A.
= new reply since forum marked as read
That was back when I started using Linux in the '90s and I first heard the term "FUD" (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) that was attributed to M$'s sliming of any entity attempting to promote use of open-source / "free as in beer" *nix software for desktops.
and find ways to do the same type of misinformation promotion and info collecting - with Fakebook being the biggest purveyor of that, notably through Instagram, which was bought by Fakebook a decade ago, and is a primary source of crap passed back and forth among whole demographic swaths of users including teens, millennials, celebrities, wannabe "internet stars", and the like.
I remember when one of my young nieces was a fan of what was then called "musical.ly" (the short video-creation and sharing app for the tween/teen set) which was eventually bought up by TikTok. She and her friends also used the "Houseparty" app to video chat (this was pre-pandemic) and apparently the owner, Epic Games, decided to discontinue it as a standalone and folded it into their MMORPG VR Fortnite game.
I continually read stories about people discovering their info from these entities somehow manage to get harvested by other 3rd party apps.
Apple has even gone on the offensive against this -
Facebook’s New Nightmare Is Suddenly Coming True
Kate O'Flaherty Senior Contributor
Facebook owner Meta’s new nightmare is continuing to get worse after a terrible week with falling user numbers leading to dramatic share price drops. It comes after a bad 2021 for the Mark Zuckerberg owned company, which rebranded to Meta late last year following whistleblower allegations, regulatory headaches and a growing #DeleteFacebook movement. While many people had been considering deleting Facebook—or at least cutting down their use of the social network—the actual user numbers haven’t noticeably suffered, until now.
But this week, the nightmare worsened as Facebook owner Meta reported its fourth quarter earnings, which showed that the social network had seen its number of active users drop for the first time in its 18 year history, the BBC reports. Zuckerberg blamed the fall on a decline in younger users, who favored Facebook’s rivals over the two-decade-old social network. Shortly afterwards, Meta’s share price slumped by 25% and $230 billion was wiped off its market value. It was reportedly one of the biggest single-day declines ever recorded. Meta’s overall earnings of $33.6 billion did narrowly beat expectations, but the impact of a user exodus and Apple’s privacy changes indicate big problems ahead for the data hungry firm.
Apple’s App Tracking Transparency privacy feature—which stops firms such as Facebook from tracking people through iPhone identifiers—is hitting the firm hard, it’s been confirmed. It had previously been predicted that the impact would cost $10 billion—a figure repeated this week by Meta CFO Dave Wehner following the firm’s earnings report, according to CNBC. “We believe the impact of iOS overall is a headwind on our business in 2022,” he said. “It’s on the order of $10 billion, so it’s a pretty significant headwind for our business.” And the consequences of Apple’s privacy changes could be even worse, Facebook owner Meta admits. The $10 billion figure is just an estimate, Wehner said.
Link to tweet
Facebook says the changes are harming the accuracy of its ads, because a lack of data makes it hard to target people using iPhones. Meta’s Wehner also called out Apple’s deal with Google, as he suggested the iOS privacy changes aren’t having as much impact on search. “Given that Apple continues to take billions of dollars a year from Google Search, the incentive clearly is for this policy discrepancy to continue,” he said, according to CNBC.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2022/02/05/facebooks-new-nightmare-is-suddenly-coming-true/?sh=795fe6833f01
TWEET TEXT IN ABOVE EXCERPT
@tim_cook
We believe users should have the choice over the data that is being collected about them and how it’s used. Facebook can continue to track users across apps and websites as before, App Tracking Transparency in iOS 14 will just require that they ask for your permission first.
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6:54 PM · Dec 17, 2020
Whether it is Russia (with their stranglehold on the GOP and the GOP's massive propaganda outlets) or China fighting a proxy war against Russia and the U.S. through use of these apps - it's all a gd mess.
This is why more and more are going back to flip phones and whatnot.
