Young people are in danger. Out of sight of parental supervision, they are being preyed on by unscrupulous companies that target their psychological vulnerabilities and encourage undesirable and often self-harming behaviour. Or so we have been told for successive generations.
Going back at least to the invention of the teenager in the post-war years, anything popular with adolescents, from comic books to pop music to video games, has been the subject of moral panics that tell us as much about the (often psychosexual) neuroses of the middle-aged as they do about the actual behaviour of the young.
The source of the latest scaremongering may come as a surprise to some, although it shouldn't. The Washington Post reports this week that Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has been paying large sums of money in the US to Targeted Victory, one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country, to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok, the Chinese-owned video-sharing app that has become the defining mode of communication for Generation Z.
“The campaign includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor,” the Post reports.
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“These bare-knuckle tactics, long commonplace in the world of politics, have become increasingly noticeable within a tech industry where companies vie for cultural relevance and come at a time when Facebook is under pressure to win back young users.”
There are perfectly legitimate reasons to be concerned about TikTok, including its exploitation of personal data, its approach to disinformation and the fact it is controlled by Beijing-based tech company ByteDance. Many of these concerns also apply, of course, to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, so Meta’s campaign seems designed both to deflect criticism of its own dubious practices and to throw sand into the wheels of a competitor that is rapidly surpassing it.
(In a sign of the platform’s growing power, the White House recently invited 30 of TikTok’s most popular influencers for a briefing on the war in Ukraine.)
A landmark moment arrived in February, when Meta announced that Facebook had lost users for the first time in its 18-year history
Leaked internal documents from a Facebook whistleblower last year indicated that TikTok was already two to three times more popular than Instagram among teenagers. As for Facebook, anyone who knows an under-20 will be aware that it ranks alongside rotary telephones and holiday postcards as a quaint but hilariously archaic means of keeping in touch.
While Meta still boasts more than 3.5 billion users a month across its platforms, an ageing user base and disruption of its advertising business model by companies such as Apple, along with the prospect of stricter legal controls on its activities, mean it’s playing defence in a way it has never had to do before, and on several different fronts.
A landmark moment arrived in February, when Meta announced that Facebook had lost users for the first time in its 18-year history. Responding, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg identified TikTok as a key threat. "People have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time, and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly," he complained, sounding remarkably like the old-school media moguls whose businesses he destroyed 15 years ago.
In the long term, Zuckerberg banks on pivoting his company to the yet-to-be-defined “metaverse”, driven by augmented and virtual reality. Even if that unappealingly dystopian masterplan comes to fruition, it could take up a decade to achieve. In the meantime, there’s a dirty rearguard action to be fought.
“Dream would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger: how TikTok has become the most harmful social media space for kids’,” one staffer on the campaign wrote. Meanwhile, Meta relentlessly pushes its own TikTok clone product, Reels. The shortform video app, which looks pretty much identical to TikTok, now features heavily in the most-popular posts on both Facebook and Instagram. It’s not hard to see the hypocrisy.
“We believe all platforms, including TikTok, should face a level of scrutiny consistent with their growing success,” a spokesperson for Meta said in a bland response to the Washington Post story.
It’s a very long time since Zuckerberg’s protestations that he just wanted his company to bring people together cut much ice.
What’s so striking about this week’s story is how enthusiastically Meta has embraced tactics developed in the money-soaked cesspool of American partisan politics: paying sockpuppets to parrot its talking points in regional media outlets; planting letters from supposedly concerned citizens on newspaper letter pages; whipping up fear wherever it can.
We shouldn’t be surprised, of course. But the old question must be asked: should we be subjecting our young people to this filth?
