Eleven years in the past, Facebook was caught red-handed after it employed a to strive to plant tales harshly criticising Google’s privateness practices in main information shops.
In 2018, it employed the PR agency Definers to do opposition analysis on the corporate’s critics, together with billionaire philanthropist George Soros. The firm’s longtime head of communications, Elliot Schrage, for approving the hiring of Definers and comparable companies and left Facebook.
On Wednesday, The that Meta, Facebook’s mum or dad firm, is utilizing comparable tactics to go after one other rival TikTok. Meta, the Post reported, employed a Republican consulting agency known as Targeted Victory to “orchestrate a nationwide marketing campaign” against TikTok.
Targeted Victory, in accordance to the Post, contracted with dozens of public relations companies throughout the US to assist “sway public opinion against TikTok” by planting native information tales and serving to place op-eds focusing on TikTok across the nation, the story says.
Meta confirmed that it has employed Targeted Victory.
“We consider all platforms, together with TikTok, ought to face a degree of scrutiny per their rising success,” spokesman Andy Stone mentioned in a press release.
Zac Moffatt, the CEO of Targeted Victory, mentioned the corporate “manages bipartisan groups on behalf of our purchasers.”
“It is public information we now have labored with Meta for a number of years and we’re pleased with the work we now have accomplished,” he mentioned in a press release.
The Post obtained inside emails from Targeted Victory that outlined a marketing campaign to undermine TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese firm ByteDance. The agency used a mixture of “real considerations and unfounded anxieties” about TikTok so as to strive to flip public and political sentiment against it.
According to the report, Targeted Victory was additionally working to get “proactive protection” about Facebook into native media, together with “submitting letters and opinion items talking glowingly of Facebook’s function in, as an example, supporting Black-owned companies.”
“We are deeply involved that the stoking of native media stories on alleged tendencies that haven’t been discovered on the platform might trigger actual world hurt,” TikTok mentioned in an emailed assertion. – AP
