What do you do when a newcomer enters your market and starts attracting the younger crowd? If you’re Facebook and you want to keep up your reputation for making the worst possible choices in such circumstances, you hire a firm to plant fake stories about the competition. WaPo (Gift Article): Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok. “Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok.
The campaign includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor. These bare-knuckle tactics, long commonplace in the world of politics, have become increasingly noticeable within a tech industry where companies vie for cultural relevance and come at a time when Facebook is under pressure to win back young users.”

+ And plenty of news outlets took the bait, especially on the local level. I guess the goal was to scare parents who would then convince their kids to get off Tik Tok and get onto Facebook. I’m pretty sure my kids made a Tik Tok parody song about that plot.