A story broke Wednesday in The Washington Post that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, paid the GOP-aligned public relations firm Targeted Victory to “malign” TikTok.

There are, of course, different opinions about the ethics of, as The Post writes, “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.”

Tik Tok is objectively a national security threat and a threat to American kids.

Meta paying to expose it makes it seem more nefarious but good on them and @TargetedVictory for exposing it. https://t.co/AG8CyhOoxw

— Matt Whitlock (@mattdizwhitlock) March 30, 2022

Whitlock is likely referring to the fact that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is headquartered in China and has been scrutinized for its ties to the Chinese Communist Party for years. Yes, it’s entirely possible that all those dancing teens and pronoun-ed teachers are feeding their videos back to the CCP.

US officials have been assessing TikTok’s relationship with China for years. In 2020, President Trump attempted to ban — and then force a sale — of TikTok’s US app. President Biden signed an executive order revoking Trump’s efforts in June, writing that the government should evaluate national security threats from foreign apps through “rigorous, evidence-based analysis.”

As the Chinese government began cracking down on tech companies within its own borders last year, concerns around TikTok’s relationship with the country remained among US officials, experts said.

…

TikTok isn’t available in China, and its CEO and COO are based in Singapore and Los Angeles. But current and former employees told Insider that employees in ByteDance’s Beijing office, referred to internally as “HQ,” often have final say over product decisions for the app.

“It’s that feeling a little bit in the US where you’re sort of helpless to a lot of the decisions that are made out of China,” a former staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid damaging professional relationships, told Insider last month.

So why then does American Federation of Teachers head Randi Weingarten take such an interest in protecting TikTok from mean old Mark Zuckerberg when, per her own argument, he’s engaging in competitve behavior via a PR firm that companies (and politicians) routinely pay big money for.

Here’s a thread Weingarten took time to write culminating in a demand that Facebook apologize to “America’s teachers, students, and parents”.

When I first started encountering problematic content on social media and hearing how kids were struggling with it, it was unclear to me how the social media companies themselves were involved. But now, I understand it’s their business model encouraging much of this to happen https://t.co/e2r797uBHY

— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten) March 31, 2022

Interestingly, she cites a story from Verge magazine in which TikTok is cast as a pitiful pawn of misinformation as some schools closed due to unspecified and possibly false threats spreading across the social media app.

The reports of threats on TikTok may be self-perpetuating. Videos being posted to TikTok warn others that they should skip school on December 17th due to supposed threats of shootings or bombings, which seem to have prompted others to create similar videos. And now that schools are canceling classes in response to those supposed threats, a new wave of videos have popped up with additional warnings based on both the supposed claims and the actual, factual cancellations of some school classes.

TikTok says it has not identified any videos making specific threats. “We have not found evidence of such threats originating or spreading via TikTok,” the company wrote in a tweet Thursday afternoon. TikTok said it is working with law enforcement to look into the warnings with “utmost seriousness,” nonetheless.

This is all quite disturbing to Weingarten, who sees Facebook as a big business bully trying to squash competition by disparaging an already struggling tech platform.

Facebook’s response yesterday to spreading fear among parents, teachers, and school communities was to defend what they did. We think every platform should have oversight, especially when targeting youth, but what Facebook did is especially disgraceful. pic.twitter.com/RV3FkXbWf4

— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten) March 31, 2022

One would think Ms. Weingarten — whose job title would indicate her time would be better spent engaged in and trying to assuage the turmoil currently enveloping American schools — would have more things on her plate to worry about than if one tech platform has crossed anti-competitive lines.