By Mackenzie Quick, Ph.D. student
Originally published: April 18, 2022
If you recognize the phrase in this blog post’s title, odds are that you have a TikTok account. The mobile app, which uses trending sound bites like this as a primary consideration for content creation, started gaining popularity during the initial COVID-19 lockdowns. Since then, its user base has continued to grow, now with a reported one billion monthly active users. According to reporting by The Guardian, “TikTok is on track to overtake the global advertising scale of Twitter and Snapchat combined this year, and to match mighty YouTube within two years.” This rapid progress seems to have caught the attention of Meta, which has seen steady declines in user engagement across its two largest platforms, Facebook and Instagram. While Meta is still dominating the social media market with 2.9 monthly active users on Facebook and around one billion monthly active users on Instagram, it is now more obvious the extent to which the company views TikTok as a threat.
Recently, we learned Meta is paying an influential Republican consulting firm to organize what is essentially a smear campaign against TikTok. The firm, Targeted Victory, has previously worked with the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC. Targeted Victory earned a reported $237 million in 2020 alone.
Facebook’s tactical smear campaign has continued to purport that TikTok is dangerous on account of its Chinese origins. This was a premise first spouted by former President Donald Trump, who briefly considered banning the app in the United States. The Washington Post received internal emails from Targeted Victory employees that contained comments like, “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,” and “Dream would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger: how TikTok has become the most harmful social media space for kids.” Headlines detailing TikTok trends like slapping school teachers and vandalizing school property soon appeared, prompting attention from United States government officials.
While campaigns of this nature are not necessarily new for the tech industry, partnerships between partisan consultants and digital communication platforms should be considered problematic, especially given Meta’s ongoing improprieties regarding foreign interventions and disinformation. During the 2016 election, Russia was able to run a successful advertising campaign with the goal of splintering the American public. Additionally, Trump campaign manager Brad Pascale was working closely with Facebook employees to generate pointed advertising campaigns based on Facebook’s user data. Both of these factors were instrumental in Trump being elected president that year. Once this information became public, Facebook committed to making improvements to its infrastructure in order to better combat these issues in the future. But as pointed out by Siva Vaidhyanathan in Antisocial media: How Facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy, “Facebook made only cosmetic changes to its practices and policies that have fostered anti-democratic– often violent– movements for years… It pumped up its staff to vet troublesome posts but failed to enforce its own policies when Trump and other conservative interests were at stake” (p. 245).
Facebook continues to be a hotbed for conservative talking points, with personalities like Ben Shapiro, Franklin Graham, and Dan Bongino consistently generating impressive rates of engagement. We live in the era of an attention economy, and increased demand for information will lead to an increase in supply of said information. Facebook’s bread and butter is user engagement, and with conservative pages consistently performing well, it is easy to assume that conservative users are a key demographic to which Facebook would cater. The TikTok smear campaign aside, Meta further entangling itself with conservative interests should raise some eyebrows. Mark Zuckerberg often touts Facebook as a neutral vessel of information, but by enlisting partisan consultants to manage its affairs, Facebook’s dealings are lightyears away from Zuckerberg’s claims to neutrality.