Consulting Company Responds Over Facebook ‘Smear’ Report

The chief executive of political consulting firm Targeted Victory has claimed aspects of a Washington Post report about a campaign the firm conducted for Meta/Facebook are “simply false”.

The Post last week said it had seen internal emails from Targeted Victory, which has carried out high-profile work for the US’ Republican Party, allegedly suggesting the Meta paid the company to portray key rival TikTok as “as a danger to American children”.

Zac Moffatt said on Twitter that the article “mischaracterises” his company’s work.

“Key points are simply false,” he added.

‘Dubious stories’

Meta said in a statement, “We believe all platforms, including TikTok, should face a level of scrutiny consistent with their growing success.”

The Post reported that Targeted Victory’s campaign included placing opinion pieces and letters to the editor in US regional news outlets “promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook”.

It said none of the opinion pieces or letters to the editor disclosed that they backed by a Meta-funded group.

Moffatt said the Post’s article “infers that the words of the letters to the editor were not the authors’ own, nor did they know of Meta’s involvement. That is false.”

The internal emails allegedly urge Targeted Victory’s partners to get stories into local media that link TikTok to dangerous trends.

Rivalry

“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’,” one Targeted Victory staff member allegedly wrote in an email apparently seen by the Post.

The paper alleged that Targeted Victory encouraged operatives to amplify reports of dangerous trends linked to TikTok.

Some of the supposedly dangerous TikTok “challenges” may not have really existed, yet the Post found that stories about them spread on Facebook.

TikTok said in response to the Post’s article: “We are deeply concerned that the stoking of local media reports on alleged trends that have not been found on the platform could cause real world harm.”

Smear campaign

Moffatt said the Post itself had reported on the rumoured trends.

“These viral stories about TikTok they claim are ‘rumors’ were actually reported by their own newspaper,” he wrote.

He added that although the company is “right-of-centre” it manages “bipartisan teams”.

In 2018 the New York Times reported that Facebook had hired public relations company Definers to circulate a document falsely claiming that anti-Facebook campaign group Freedom From Facebook was backed by financier George Soros.

Meta/Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said at the time he had not been aware of the Definers actions and that the company would no longer work with his firm.