Facebook hired Targered Victory, an American Republican consulting company, to damage the reputation of TikTok, according to The Washington Post. The report indicates that the dirty move against the Chinese platform was launched only in the United States. The aforementioned firm turned to local newspapers to try to instill a negative opinion against TikTok. The reason? It is a competitor that they have not been able to counteract, not even through Instagram.
In fact, in documents obtained by the aforementioned medium, a Targered Victory manager makes it clear that, for Facebook, “TikTok is the real threat”, and adds: “Especially because it is a foreign application. which is number one in sharing data used by teenagers. Of course, it is curious that Meta's social network expresses itself in this way when they themselves are often involved in privacy scandals on a constant basis.
During the campaign, Targered Victory was sharing news that spoke negatively about TikTok. Some of them were part of the wave of reports when Donald Trump, the former president of the United States, waged a war against the ByteDance platform. According to the authorities, TikTok was used as an espionage weapon by China. The company's operations in the US were about to be sold to a third party to survive in the territory in the face of an imminent blockade.
However, to give “greater credibility” to the information against TikTok, the consultancy also relied on negative opinions from Democratic politicians and other influential public figures. Targeted Victory's work was impeccable in the sense that, in no case could a direct relationship be established between the media and Facebook. The bad news —for them— is that The Washington Post report exposes the true association behind it. At the moment, yes, Facebook has not commented on the matter.
Facebook can't handle TikTok
Credit: Unsplash Clearly, Facebook's goal is to get rid of its biggest rival at any cost, and no matter what practices are necessary. This dirty move comes to light shortly after Facebook acknowledged having lost daily active users for the first time in its history. In North America alone, their biggest market globally, they lost 1 million daily users. In contrast, TikTok continues to grow, mainly among the young public.
As if the above weren't worrying enough for those led by Mark Zuckerberg, WhatsApp and Instagram show no signs of growth in recent quarters. The case of the second is especially worrying because its responsibility is precisely to deal with the popularity of TikTok. Not even the introduction of constant news, many of them copied from TikTok, have been enough to increase its popularity.
All this situation, together, caused Facebook to collapse in the stock market. In a matter of one day it lost 24% of its market capitalization, being the largest loss of value in 24 hours for a US company in history.
