How Zuckerberg is dishing dirt on rising Tik Tok in multimillion-dollar campaign

Mark Zukerberg is going all out in his fight against TikTok , a rival that impacted the social media platform’s bottom line in last quarterly report.

In the US, an average social media user spends 26 hours on TikTok, compared to the eight hours spent on Facebook.

Besides cloning some of Tiki Tok’s feature for his Metaverse, Zuckerberg has hired Targeted Victory, a political consulting firm to damage the Chinese platform in the media, according to Washington Post.

The consultant has helped Meta work with PR groups nationwide to plant anti-TikTok campaigns in local news outlets.

Among the campaigns are :Highlighting TikTok as a threatening foreign-owned app that collects and shares data on American teens.

They have also pushed stories tying TikTok to dangerous teen behavior, including the “devious licks” challenge, which encouraged teens to steal all kinds of wild objects from schools.

Others included spreading rumors of a “Slap a Teacher TikTok challenge,” which never actually existed on the platform and started on Facebook.

While Meta sustained the mudslinging, the firm also spread positive messages about Meta’s properties, including stories about Facebook’s moves to support Black-owned businesses.

On lobbying alone last year, Meta spent over $20m, the biggest among the top six spenders on lobbying in that period.