Success brings many benefits, but it also raises blisters. This is what happens to Meta with TikTok, Facebook's parent company is not happy that it is another network that takes the attention of the public, especially the youngest. So much so that, in 2022, Meta would have financed a campaign to discredit the Chinese social network .
To do so, it reportedly hired the services of Targeted Victory, a well-known consulting firm with ties to the Republican Party. Meta spokesman Andy Stone said, “We believe all platforms, including TikTok, should face a level of scrutiny commensurate with their growing success .” However, internal emails from Targeted Victory seen by The Washington Post revealed that part of Meta’s strategy revolved around blaming TikTok for dangerous trends that had actually emerged on Meta apps .
The goal, according to an exclusive published by The australia number data Washington Post, was to make TikTok be perceived as “a danger to American children and young people” and to get politicians to take action against the social network. The US government was already monitoring TikTok before Meta launched this campaign.
US government accuses TikTok of espionage
In 2020, Donald Trump banned doing business with ByteDance , something that was forgotten when Joe Biden came to power. However, now the Chinese social network is back in the spotlight.
In December 2022, it was discovered that ByteDance employees had accessed data from American journalists from Forbes magazine who were investigating the company's US branch's links to China. ByteDance eventually admitted the existence of this operation, called Project Raven, and fired the internal auditor and two employees of the team.
In January 2023, the US House of Representatives banned its employees from installing TikTok on federal government devices, except for those used for research purposes. Catherine Szpindor , the US House's chief administrative officer, cited "security risk" as the reason for this measure, suggesting that TikTok could be a spy weapon used by the Chinese government, specifically by the Communist Party. This led to some 19 states issuing the same ban on their employees.