Meta paid a GOP-linked firm to promote negative coverage of rival TikTok, The Washington Post reports

• Meta hired a GOP-linked firm to promote negative TikTok coverage, The Washington Post reported.
• Targeted Victory reportedly boosted the "Devious Licks" and purported "slap a teacher" challenges.
• The firm promoted "proactive coverage" of Facebook at the same time, the report says.

Meta, the owner of Facebook, paid the Republican consulting firm Targeted Victory to promote negative and dubious news stories about purported dangerous TikTok trends, according to a new Washington Post report.

Emails viewed by The Washington Post reportedly showed Targeted Victory trying to push the firm's partners to get local outlets to write stories tying TikTok to alleged harmful trends, in order to show that the platform, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, is not safe. This effort came as TikTok has become one of the biggest apps globally, especially among kids and teens, and as younger audiences have turned away from Facebook.

Among the content Targeted Victory pushed was the "Devious Licks" challenge, which involved students making videos claiming to have stolen items from their school bathrooms, according to The Washington Post. The firm also boosted the purported October 2021 "slap a teacher" challenge, which started as a rumor on Facebook but was never actually a trend. Despite that, numerous local police departments and schools from across the country sent out bulletins warning of the purported craze. Rumors about that challenge also spread online as part of a longer list of hypothetical TikTok challenges.

While it was promoting negative coverage of TikTok, the firm was also trying to amplify positive, "proactive coverage" of Facebook, "including submitting letters and opinion pieces speaking glowingly of Facebook's role in, for instance, supporting Black-owned businesses," The Washington Post wrote in the report.

The agency also worked with numerous public relations firms from different parts of the country to establish a negative aura around TikTok and helped plant anti-TikTok op-eds in multiple local outlets, according to The Washington Post. 

The Virginia-based firm, which says it uses a "right-wing perspective to solve marketing challenges" on its website, was founded by Zac Moffatt, who worked as the Digital Director for Republican senator Mitt Romney's failed presidential bid in 2012.

In a Twitter thread responding to The Washington Post's report on Wednesday, Moffatt claimed  the piece "mischaracterizes the work we do" and "key points are simply false." 

In the last year, there have been numerous challenges that local outlets reported were "TikTok trends" when, in reality, they had minimal association with TikTok, predated the app, or originated on a different platform. Challenges that were attributed to TikTok without evidence included the "blackout challenge," which existed in various forms long before the app, and the "magnet challenge," which also dates back many years. 

The misinformation researcher Abbie Richards previously told Insider that the chatter around purported TikTok challenges was playing on an age-old fear held by parents about what their children are doing "when you're not watching." Richards compared the TikTok challenge hoaxes to the Satanic Panic moral panic of the 1980s.