/https://www.thestar.com/content/dam/thestar/business/opinion/2022/04/02/social-media-is-too-important-to-public-discourse-to-let-facebook-call-the-shots/facebook.jpg)
Congratulations, Facebook. If you were trying to further the image of yourself as a cartoon villain, well done.
The hired firm, Targeted Victory, was enlisted by Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant to paint TikTok as not only a threatening foreign company but a danger to American children and families.
The scheme worked by pushing dubious stories of dangerous trends spreading on TikTok to local news outlets, that would in turn happily pass on the scaremongering. What’s more, letters to the editor expressing concern over TikTok would appear in publications such as the Denver Post, forming a sort of astroturfing campaign on behalf of one of the world’s richest companies.
No public claims about Targeted Victory’s links to Facebook or parent company Meta were made. Those letters to the editor appeared to simply come “from a concerned parent.”
Source: Toronto Star
Date: March 31st, 2022
Discussion
- Is it actually illegal for Facebook to pay a consulting firm to essentially make up stories about a rival, TikTok in this case, that put them in a bad light?
- The author suggests that Facebook should not be left to it’s own supervision. Which government agency should be responsible for overseeing Facebook (and others)?
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