Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok

Gandalf_The_Grey

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The firm, Targeted Victory, pushed local operatives across the country to boost messages calling TikTok a threat to American children. “Dream would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger,’ ” one campaign director said.

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.

Employees with the firm, Targeted Victory, worked to undermine TikTok through a nationwide media and lobbying campaign portraying the fast-growing app, owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance, as a danger to American children and society, according to internal emails shared with The Washington Post.

Targeted Victory needs to “get the message out that 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,” a director for the firm wrote in a February email.

Campaign operatives were also encouraged to use TikTok’s prominence as a way to deflect from Meta’s own privacy and antitrust concerns.
 
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ForgottenSeer 94654

So what? Don't matter. Both Facebook and Tik Tok is bad for children. Lots of parents complain about social media and how it is messing up their kids.

Social media and smart phones just messing kids up. The evidence supplied by public health professionals has not been challenged by the likes of Facebook, Tik Tok, and others and they've all been shot down as manipulators and bad influencers.

If your kid says "I need a mental health day" in response to you asking them to do some chores like take out the trash or wash dishes, you can thank social media and the mob for that. And if you give in and just let your kid lie around, it is nobody's fault but your own.
 
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Local Host

So what? Don't matter. Both Facebook and Tik Tok is bad for children. Lots of parents complain about social media and how it is messing up their kids.

Social media and smart phones just messing kids up. The evidence supplied by public health professionals has not been challenged by the likes of Facebook, Tik Tok, and others and they've all been shot down as manipulators and bad influencers.

If your kid says "I need a mental health day" in response to you asking them to do some chores like take out the trash or wash dishes, you can thank social media and the mob for that. And if you give in and just let your kid lie around, it is nobody's fault but your own.
Sorry, but using social media as an excuse for your kid poor behaviour is poor parenting.

They are your responsability, not anyone elses, not to mention social media doesn't allow kids to have accounts on their services, which is why they lie about their age when creating an account (again is your responsability to stop that, not anyone elses).
 
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ForgottenSeer 94654

Sorry, but using social media as an excuse for your kid poor behaviour is poor parenting.

They are your responsability, not anyone elses, not to mention social media doesn't allow kids to have accounts on their services, which is why they lie about their age when creating an account (again is your responsability to stop that, not anyone elses).
That is a statement that works on paper, but not in practice.

Even if parents take away the phones, the kids will just go out and buy their own. If they cannot manage to do that, then their friends will help them. Yeah buddy, parents ain't gonna stop an generation of kids or teens from doing what they want - not unless you lock your children up.

Public health professionals have published data that is more certain than climate change that social media has made Millennials and Gen Z more mentally ill, prone to not want to do physical activity, more obese, and a whole other range of public health issues.
 
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