Snippet: Facebook Funded Anti-TikTok Campaign Through GOP Firm ☇

Makena Kelly for The Verge:

The firm, Targeted Victory, reportedly planted op-eds and letters to the editor in major local and regional newspapers across the country. A Targeted Victory director told staff that the firm needed 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,” according to emails obtained by The [Washington] Post.

News of Facebook’s decision to hire the firm comes only a few weeks after the company declared that it was losing users for the first time in its 18-year history. Meta’s recent earnings report said that Facebook’s active users dropped by almost 500,000 at the end of last year.

Cool. I’m sure teens are going to change their opinion based on a newspaper op-ed. Plus, why worry about your data being siphoned by a foreign app when you can have your data shared by a good ol’ fashioned American app! Meta ought to use this as an opportunity to figure out why people are abandoning its platforms—poor UI, spreading of misinformation, and general creepiness.