Emails show Meta, the parent company of Facebook, “paid GOP consultants to smear TikTok as it lost teens,” Huffington Post reported on Wednesday, March 31, 2022 (read story here).
Facebook “sought to cast its rival as harmful to teenagers and a danger to society,” Huffington Post says. To do that, Facebook “quietly paid a Republican consulting firm to smear the social media rival,” according to the Huffington Post report.
The story says the Washington Post obtained emails that show “a GOP strategy group seeded anti-TikTok stories in local media across the country at the behest of Meta,” going so far as to blame TikTok “for harmful trends that actually originated on Facebook and Instagram,” which Facebook owns, such as a “challenge … that encouraged students to vandalize school property.”
“The Washington Post revelations align with Meta’s longtime strategy of buying rivals or, failing that, copying their best features and trying to bully them out of existence,” Huffington Post said, pointing out that, “In 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg attempted to buy TikTok’s predecessor, but, having been rebuffed, set out to cast it as a threat to democracy.”
And you thought Facebook founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is a warm and fuzzy teddy bear, right?