President Barack Obama jokes backstage with Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, June 24, 2016, at Stanford University. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza) / New York Post cover
Some U.S. politicians want to ban the China-Based social media platform TikTok, and if that happens, Facebook parent and competitor Meta could be among the biggest beneficiaries based on potential advertising revenue.
One hundred million U.S. users love the viral content delivered through TikTok’s short videos. TikTok could make $9 billion to $10 billion in U.S. revenue in 2024, research firm CFRA said in a note. The probability TikTok will be banned is increasing, the firm said.
The White House supports a new bipartisan Senate bill that would give the Biden administration the power to ban TikTok in the U.S. The RESTRICT Act would give the Commerce Secretary power to act on “undue or unacceptable risk” to national security posed by technology transactions in which foreign adversaries have an interest.
TikTok has become the lightning rod in the geopolitical and economic battle between the U.S. and China over tech leadership and national security.
The U.S. government is concerned that TikTok could put U.S. customers’ data at risk because Chinese law requires China’s companies to share information with the government, according to FBI director Chris Wray. The Chinese government can control the software on millions of devices because of its relationship with TikTok owner, Wray told the Senate Intelligence Committee on March 8.
“Something that’s very sacred in our country — the difference between the private sector and the public sector — that’s a line that is nonexistent in the way the CCP operates,” Wray said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.
In an October 2021 opinion piece, New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin opined that the White House was not stolen from Trump, it was bought and paid for with money from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg — a concept dubbed “Zuck’s Bucks”.
Goodwin based this argument on conservative author and Fox contributor Mollie Hemingway’s book “Rigged,” which he said “lays out what amounts to a fascinating alternative to the ‘stolen’ charge. She presents a strong case that the $419 million that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg ostensibly spent to get out the vote was actually used by Democrat activists to infiltrate local election operations and take over jobs government workers were supposed to do.”
Hemingway claims that two Zuckerberg nonprofits paid Democrat groups in key cities to hire poll workers, collect absentee ballots and cure those with errors. Hemingway wrote that Democrats stole the election by privatizing the election system.
Texas researcher William Doyle crunched the numbers to show how the nonprofits concentrated in areas Biden won, often spending three or four times as much money per voter as they spent in districts Trump won.
“The 2020 election wasn’t stolen,” Doyle wrote. “It was likely bought by one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men pouring his money through legal loopholes.”
Meta outspends all but six of the biggest U.S. companies and industry groups in federal lobbying, paying more than $20 million in 2021, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets.
The Facebook parent paid Targeted Victory, one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the U.S., to orchestrate a nationwide campaign to turn the public against its biggest competitor, TikTok, according to internal emails shared with the Washington Post in March 30, 2022. Employees at Targeted Victory undermined TikTok via a national media and lobbying campaign portraying the app as a danger to American children and society.
The campaign included promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing political reporters and local politicians into helping take down TikTok as Meta struggled to win back young users, the Post reported.
Targeted Victory needs 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,” a director for the firm wrote in a February email. Lobbyists were also encouraged to use TikTok’s prominence to deflect from Meta’s privacy and antitrust issues. “Bonus point if we can fit this into a broader message that the current bills/proposals aren’t where [state attorneys general] or members of Congress should be focused,” a Targeted Victory staffer wrote.
While calls to ban TikTok may be gaining momentum, Meta may be safe from regulatory pressure in 2023, Needham analyst Laura Martin wrote in a March 8 note. That’s partly because Meta – which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp – isn’t as “big” of a target as it once was. “Two separate D.C. experts believed that regulatory scrutiny of Meta had moderated because its share price has fallen,” Martin wrote.
