It Could Happen Here - Devious Licks and Manufactured Danger

Episode Date: April 13, 2022

We look at how Facebook manufactured TikTok scares and manipulated the media in their endless quest of market share.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, yeah! It could happen here.

The only podcast that is on right now in your ears where you can listen to us talk about things falling apart and occasionally more optimistic stuff. Garrison, is this one of the more optimistic stuff days? Not really. Oh, great.

It's things falling apart, but in a slightly amusing way. Oh, well, that's fine too. Yeah, it's going to be fine. So is any of y'alls familiar with the devious licks? Vaguely. Yeah. So I'm sure all of the lick fans are going to be really excited about today's episode because the first half we'll be talking about all of the licks. So for those unfamiliar, the devious licks meme challenge thing

started with this video by a kid who had stolen, quote unquote stolen, a bunch of like COVID masks from his school and then was showing off his played over you know played over a song or something as as you do on the tiktoks so they posted the video with this caption uh a month into school absolutely devious lick um i i and lick i think lick just means like stealing like like you like stole something and like that's like that is a lick um i was so sad when i first heard about this i i heard i heard someone say devious licks and i was like they're like oh the tiktok channels and i was like oh shit people are like walking up to like like they're gonna like lick the underside of a bridge or something and then it was not that unfortunately unfortunately

not yeah it is it is it is a real loss um so this video went very, very viral on TikTok very, very quickly, mostly among kids whose, like, their in-person school had just started. This was a thing in, like, late August, early September of last year. You know, first with, you know, the initial video then subsequently inspired a bunch of copycat school-related heists that then posted into TikToks. First, with people just stealing, like, small, mostly low-stakes things, usually inside the bathrooms. You know, stuff like toilet paper rolls, paper towel rolls, soap from soap dispensers, light bulbs, big like like floor tiles uh just like just like small things um but after a while the small fry wasn't was not enough anymore people started to

get more um brazen uh more more more devious you might say with their legs wow yeah they they were they moved on to like full-on toilet heists um and uh you know electric hand dryers they stole a teacher's entire desk um and a uh a whole bathroom sink so incredible yeah and eventually they kind of dropped all pretense of this being heisting and just started just like destroying the bathrooms uh not even stealing things anymore yeah garrison you and i have a friend who works at a school where this has been we got accused of like uh pushing disinformation when we talked about this on worst year but it's like no we know people who work at a school that has not had functional

student bathrooms it's very funny as a just just just to clarify my opinion on it very funny yes it's um yes they but yeah just just it it started it started with stealing and then just got turned into let's just destroy the bathrooms which is pretty funny kids rock kids rock so obviously, schools, teachers, and principals were scrambling. Their confusion only upseeded by their being upset. Sounds like they shouldn't have allowed children to be born into a world where TikTok could exist. It really is on them. And all of the upsetness by teachers and schools only contributed to the meme, with kids posting their principals' reactions to it.

You know, like, people, like, announcing over the intercom, like, new rules about how to prevent the bathroom destruction. Schools were having to, like, station staff members outside of bathrooms to, like, check and hopefully, like, ward off any possible destructive shenanigans. It was this entire thing. And it got to the point where TikTok actually had to step in to kind of curb this meme. They banned the hashtag devious slick. They took down any content that had anything to do with the trend. And this seemed to work. After a few weeks, the meme kind of reached the end of its virality cycle. Teachers got to breathe a sigh of relief. Maybe there would be no more smashed bathrooms or stolen desks.

Oh, you fools. You fools. But their calm did not last long. By the end of September, there were rumors percolating around that devious... Percolating. Yeah.

I got you, Garrison. Percolating. Percolating. Come on. I don't know. But it was said that the devious slicks may not have a wooden stake through its heart, and we may have only witnessed the first wave with something much darker lurking around the corner. On Facebook, various parent, teacher, and law enforcement groups started circulating

some purported shenanigan plans from the kids on TikTok. There was this month-by-month calendar detailing to kids what sick pranks they should play on their school for the entire rest of the year. And a few versions of this calendar were spread around, but they all shared the same basic overall structure and prank ideas, just some like wording and phrasing changed. And the first upcoming challenge for the month of October was slap a teacher. This spread beyond Facebook and including to local news. Now, another TikTok challenge getting a lot of attention tonight, and it's a violent one targeting teachers. The Nevada Joint Union superintendent asking parents now to tell their kids not to participate in this challenge.

It encourages students to actually slap their teachers so although the smack a teacher line was what really got this thing to go viral on facebook uh the the main screenshotted calendar that was being circulated uh the actual october challenge was listed as smack a staff member on the backside. That was the actual phrasing, which is a little bizarre. Smack a staff member on the backside. November is kiss your friend's girlfriend at school. So again, weird phrasing. December is deck the halls and show your balls in school halls, which that one was probably written by a child. But then we get other stuff like January is jab a breast. So more, more sexual assault jokes. February, we have mess up school signs. March is make a mess in the courtyard or cafeteria. April, this one's weird. April is grab some eggs, but eggs is in quotation marks with a Z at the end.

May is ditch day. That's fine. June is flip off the front office. Okay, who cares? And July is spray a neighbor's fence wow graffiti scary um so yeah that is that is that is the calendar of challenges uh some of these seem more i mean we talked about this a couple of months ago and my feeling was that this started as something real just like legitimate kids doing the thing yeah and and this this shit was where it became nonsense. It was just like people sharing things that were going to anger boomers. We will get into this. So yeah, as news about the TikTok challenges spread on Facebook,

media orgs picked up on the trend and started shouting out headlines like, TikTok's shocking school challenges list 2021 revealed. And devious licks asks students via tiktok to smack a staff member the nation's teachers are feeling burnt out so great great headlines there um so all of that sounds so obviously very scary um if if if teens around the country are all united in this in this in in this uh planned destruction of our entire civilization that that you know we could all be brought onto the brink of uh via teens destroying their schools was so that would be that would be kind of fun um but if you stop and think about the wording of that list for a sec you might notice some things that just seem off like no gen z kids are saying uh

smack a staff member on the back side that is not like you are the first member of generation z to say backside backside and like the challenge for april is grab some eggs and eggs in quotation marks with a z at the end because yeah all of all of the cool kids today use a z at the end of words to make them sound cool again it's some like fucking gen x or maybe elder millennial piece of shit trying to make people angry on the internet and he's just like april what what goes with april april eggs eggs excellent yeah i don't know something but like all of the language feels like what's what what someone would write if they were trying to imitate what a cool 90s kid would talk like on tv yeah yeah it's a lot of people trying to write john hughes movies

yeah but so but all of all this was very viral for like it was for the end of september this was this was all massive and we we will don't worry i will explain why we're talking about this now because this does this this will circle back to actually current events um i'm not not just talking about a september 2021 trend this this does this does relate to stuff happening currently um but yeah like suspicious language aside the idea that the youths are purposely plotting on the TikToks to assault teachers and wreak havoc all year long frightened many an adult, especially those that work in the education sector who might have to face the possibility of a coordinated Zoomer wrath. And the past two years had already been kind of a shit show for

schools with switching to remote learning, then back to in-person. There's all the debate around masks and vaccinations and the risk of being inside around densely packed groups of filthy germ-ridden children. like having to learn now how to like socialize in the class environment, all while dealing with like the same mental trauma that we've all been dealing with around the plague. So just having faced the actual very real September devious licks, the promise of a year-long TikTok wave of destruction, obviously frightened many parents and teachers. With educators on Facebook, you know, starting to take this list as a very real threat with school districts, you know, issuing warnings and parents were, you know, informed like in mass about this very, very real, very real threat. Educators beware. That's the warning from the

California Teachers Association. The group sent this message to educators, letting them know about a potential TikTok trend, calling for students to slap a staff member. Seminole County Schools just sent this letter to principals, warning them of TikTok's October challenge, saying, quote, In the latest TikTok trend, students are asked to calmly walk up to their teachers, slap them, and then run off, making sure they capture the whole thing on camera. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by IHART and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app.

Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, and we are back. So, yeah, sure enough, news of teachers getting slapped began to circulate from local media into the national sphere alongside headlines like a tiktok inspired slap a teacher challenge assault reported at braintrees east middle school and covington police say disabled teacher injured and suspected tiktok challenge assault by student yeah so there was there was there was a there was a few slapping incidents reported onto

mainstream on onto mainstream news all all tied to the to the tiktok assault a teacher thing um a student in louisiana was arrested and faced felony charges with police saying the assault was prompted by a quote prompted by a viral social media application known as TikTok. Sorry. We've done the notorious hacker 4chan again. Everything circles back. Application known as TikTok. So yeah, in October,

there were definitely incidents of students hitting teachers. But that in and of itself is not up for debate this this there yes uh but the actual scale of content spreading this list and the subsequent slapping videos on the tic tac platform is something to question uh because writing writing off of the september dvicks trend, almost all media, police, parents, educators, were super quick to link this list and these few teacher thwackings to the social media platform used by Gen Z, the application known as TikTok. And so we have all this talk on the news and on Facebook. But the thing is, if you check TikTok, if you're actually on TikTok around this time, you wouldn't find any viral videos of teachers getting slapped or anything about this TikTok

list of challenges at all. It wasn't actually there. It wasn't actually on TikTok. This wasn't actually a thing. So then you might be thinking, well, maybe TikTok is doing what they did previously to shut down the original organic DV Slicks challenge. What if they're just doing this, like, preemptively to taking down any content related to the list, any, like, corresponding hashtags, etc., etc. But when journalists asked TikTok if this was the case, they denied this, saying that we have not seen anything of this nature on our app. saying that we have not seen anything of this nature on our app. They said the first time they, TikTok said the first time they saw the list was of screenshots of it on other websites.

It was not from TikTok. It wasn't actually there. So as more and more news circulated and blame was continuing to be put on TikTok for propagating this list of challenges and encouraging teacher assaults, the social media platform made a public statement addressing the issue, saying, quote, the rumored slap a teacher dare is an insult to educators everywhere. And while this

is not a trend on TikTok, if at any point it shows up, content will be removed. So as much as you would search online on TikTok or, you know or wherever, you wouldn't find any evidence of this list actually being spread through TikTok at all. The only thing that you would find about this on TikTok is either kids reacting to news clips talking about this or teachers on TikTok complaining about this as well. It wasn't actually a trend. The list was being shared online a lot like it was very viral but almost exclusively in facebook groups uh for boomers or adults or teachers or police uh but people seemed real scared it's fine to call all those groups boomers garrison okay that good noted um yeah it's it's it's it's like a mental ethnicity now um people people seem really scared you know schools were scared news media loves turning this list into like a looming a looming

boogeyman but it wasn't it wasn't kids actually spreading it or turning into a challenge which leaves you to wonder where did this even come from and how did it actually get so viral? So multiple fully separate investigative kind of ordeals into the alleged TikTok list of challengists placed its original point of virality in the hands of, wait, wait for it, wait for it. I'm waiting. A police officer. Oh, good. So, Officer David Gomez, a school resource cop

who runs a popular Facebook page under the banner of, quote, the truth about youth, which is... Oh, boy. Pretty cool. So, Gomez works at a school in Idaho. Big shocker.

Uh-huh. And back in September, his Facebook page had over 33,000 followers. So, Gomez works at a school in Idaho. Big shocker. And back in September, his Facebook page had over 33,000 followers. Now it has over 66,000. And he uses it as a sort of information hub for parents, educators, and concerned citizens to talk about the dangers of kids on the internet and all of that jazz. talk about the dangers of kids on the internet and all of that jazz. Gomez basically tries to be a kind of influencer for this whole concerned adult corner of the internet. He writes these long posts about school life and digital safety, touching on many topics from how your kids are secretly buying weed and vape pens,

or how to tell if your kid is looking at pornographic materials you know stuff stuff of this nature um like here here's here's here's a few posts from him from just from just a few days ago um lots of inappropriate behaviors pushed on snapchat desensitize kids to reality nude photos drugs parties crimes etc kids can order almost any illegal drug and have it delivered to them on most any place on snapchat oh if only if only so he's like he's like one of these types of guy he like you know you know who Yeah. God, if we only lived in that world, I would be on Snapchat so hard. I would be, ugh.

I love the idea that Snapchat desensitizes kids to reality by telling them about parties. Well, I mean, look, I have a profound negative mental health reaction whenever someone tells me about a party. So why wouldn't children? So as the original devious licks challenge was dying down near the end of September, on September 22nd, Officer Gomez posted this list of challenges to his thousands of followers.

In the next few days, the challenge list from his page circulated around the web, prompting many nervous school emails, terrified newscasts, and ending up actually making the list of challenges go completely viral. When asked about the origin of the list, he said the first place that he'd seen it is in a smaller private Facebook group for people working in drug and alcohol enforcement and education. He called it a drug recognition group. It's like a group of like cops and stuff who are like, I found this bag of leaves. What is it? Can I arrest this person? It's like, it's these people who like, yeah, post random stuff to figure out what drugs they're looking at. So he claims he first saw it in this

Facebook group, but admitted that he was unsure if it had actually originated from kids or not, let alone on TikTok. He just posted it because he thought, you know, better safe than sorry. But you know, it's funny because Officer Gomez's intention may just have been to spread the word about this because he thought it was an actual threat. But it turns out that he was just the one that gave it online life in the first place. So, yeah. But for, like, the actual origin of it, like, for it actually came up, as best as we can tell, it seems to have stemmed from a school in California. to it seems to have stem from a school in california a principal claims that a student sent them this list albeit a slightly more vulgar version more in line with how kids kind of talk now the teacher then uploaded it to a teacher facebook group it was then shared to this drug

recognition group with officer gomez and then gomez or someone along this process rewrote it to add the weird, like a boomer Jen's like, like, like a nineties cool kid language. And then Gomez posted it. And then that results in like the cool kids attitude. And then he posts it. It goes viral, but there's no evidence that it was ever on Tik TOK like at all.

Like this, we just know it's not actually ever on tiktok until the cop posts it so the the other funny thing is that all of these slapping incidents reported on the news including the one that resulted in an arrest also turns out to have nothing to do with the challenge list or tiktok it was just a regular like interpersonal conflict between a student and a teacher because like that happens like that happens just like every once in a while like that but it had nothing to do with tiktok uh according to the school and according to the police we had a investigation uh a substitute teacher chokeslam one of the kids in

my class and we didn't even have a tiktok we barely had the internet back then it was a pretty good day at school the principal had to come in and apologize it was very fun that that sounds great it was great yeah so uh so yeah like in the end we're gonna the the the full arc of this right starts in september with the actual real devious licks that that that did that did exist it was on tiktok but it was just you know stealing stuff from bathrooms uh it breaks off bathrooms and and and then eventually kind of just like making bathrooms into a mess um so but this this this takes off it's it goes it goes it goes pretty pretty viral then tiktok starts to crack down on it and after like three to four weeks

the meme dies it's it's you know people people are bored there's too much enforcement it's not fun it's not fun anymore and then we have this calendar list of challenges right possibly trying to spin off of like the devious licks thing and glom on from the previous trend or it was perhaps just written as like uh like a non-serious joke but the thing is like it's not actually found on tiktok right so even if this list was originally made by a kid uh it's it was not known by other kids uh on a national level either online or in person but where it does get visibility is through adults and not on tiktok but on facebook initially being passed around by teachers and school

administrators and other adults on ran on the Facebook platform and really accelerating from there, right? We have Gomez, and then it's all over Facebook. It's all over Instagram. It's all over news articles, TV stations, and eventually does get to TikTok, but not with kids talking about it, instead with teachers talking about it. But at this point, the story ofiktok slap a teacher challenge was just too like enticing right it had like enough of a grain of truth by piggybacking off of the real devious licks but it was able to grow into this like entire false reality because there were

enough ingredients for a good story and that's where you like perceptions of truth really flourish in is, is good stories. Um, and then we found out a few weeks ago, um, there was, there was this, uh, article by, uh, Taylor Lawrence, uh, in the Washington post that there actually may have been some kind of behind the scenes fuckery making this trend to go as viral as it did. Um, and we will, we will get into that after this ad break. So have fun listening to these ads, and then we will talk about the behind the scenes of

making these false online trends. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. As part of my Cultura podcast network.

Available on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcast. Hello! We are back. So, turns out, uh, lots of, lots of, there's lots of, lots of fuckery happening to make, to make, to make, to make narratives, to make stories,

right? It's all, you know, turns out that not everything you read on the internet is true. Uh, pretty, pretty shocking revelation here. you know, turns out that not everything you read on the internet is true. Pretty shocking revelation here. So it came out a few weeks ago that Facebook was actually paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a national campaign to turn the public opinion negatively towards TikTok. The campaign was placing, it included placing like op-eds and letters to editors of like, you know, major news outlets, promoting

false stories about like the growth of alleged TikTok trends that actually had started on Facebook, and then trying to push reporters and politicians into helping them damage the perception of TikTok on a nationwide level. Eventually, Facebook was obviously funding this because TikTok is their biggest competitor at the moment. So it's actually pretty interesting. So it's with this Republican digital consulting firm called Targeted Victory. So, this was the thing that Facebook was actually paying for to prompt these false stories. routinely working for Facebook for over the years. Um, you know, they were, they were involved in the 2016 congressional hearings, um, around Facebook doing stuff like with like election medley stuff,

you know, all the stuff related to like Cambridge Analytica. They were, they were, had a small part to play in that kind of thing as well. So they also receive a lot of Republican funding. Um, thing as well so they also receive a lot of republican funding um they got i think over over 237 million dollars in 2020 uh according to data compiled by open secrets which is uh yeah it's uh that biggest biggest payments came from a national gop congressional committee uh and america first action which is a a super pack ran by pro-Trump folks. So this is the group that was doing a lot of the behind the scenes stuff to specifically tie TikTok onto making it look bad, to specifically make Facebook look good and push people more onto Facebook. When this article first dropped, I know, Robert, youbert you said that hey this is a interesting

interesting little thing that is probably worth talking about in terms of how it affects politics and social media and like the intersection thereof yeah maybe a little bit so a lot of a lot of the news dropped about this uh because of employees with the firm were tasked to undermine tiktok through nationwide media and lobbying campaign. And then lots of their internal emails for this effort were shared with Washington Post. So this is how we kind of found out about this more recently. Their task was to, quote, get the message out that while meta, like Facebook, is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat, especially as a foreign-owned app that is number one in sharing data

that young teens are using, according to the director of the firm. So that's the type of stuff they're talking about behind the scenes in terms of how they're trying to push stuff to get people to stop talking about how bad Facebook is, because this was also right after

all of the Facebook Breitbart stuff was happening in terms of how much Facebook pushes extremist content to boomers and stuff. And then the other thing that they were doing was specifically trying to craft messaging to get bills passed and try to get attorneys general to focus on this

to launch investigations into how TikTok harms children and teens and that part actually was successful so you can look at the emails talking about this plan and then soon after there was actually a coalition of a state attorney general to launch a probe into whether tiktok is harmful to children and teens so you can actually look at the behind the scenes stuff that they were trying to do and then see how fast they were successful in doing this stuff. And all this also comes at the point that Facebook was for the first time actually losing users. And as soon as TikTok was launched and got so much more popular, it also took down a whole bunch of users from Instagram,

which is also owned by Facebook, so there's there's a facebook researchers said that teens were spending about three times as more time on tiktok than instagram um and this is this was all part of the same kind of overall effort to both like do stuff to influence elections and politics but also just do stuff to make kids think facebook is cool, which good luck with that one. Then in terms of the devious lick stuff, in other emails that were leaked, we got targeted victory people urging their partners to push false stories to look, or stories that are sometimes tied in truth,

but amplifying them, tying TikTok to various like dangerous uh dangerous trends you know in terms of like save the children rhetoric right this idea that face that that tiktok is harmful to the well-being of kids one of the emails uh has has a line here saying that the 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 so that's the type of headlines they're like trying to push yeah it's one of the things that they do is try to amplify negative tiktok coverage

they have this google document titled bad tiktok clips which was shared internally and included links to dubious news stories setting tiktok as the original point of various like dangerous teen trends and they were they were trying to like take these stories and push them out through other means you know so on facebook and stuff right to take any instance of this and boost it like inorganically right it's people's jobs to use social media to affect public opinion. So one trend that Targeted Victory specifically was enhancing was the Devious Licks Challenge, including the initial one to vandalize the school property. Through the bad TikTok clips document, the firm was pushing stories about the Devious Licks Challenge in local

media across Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Washington, D.C. I do find it interesting that they have a lot of these ones closer to Washington, D.C. to specifically affect politicians. They're doing stuff to amplify stuff to convince politicians specifically to start making political changes. and this actually led uh senator richard blumenthal uh a democrat from connecticut to write a letter in september calling on tiktok executives to testify in front of a senate committee um saying that the app's been repeatedly misused and abused to promote behavior and actions that encourage harmful and destructive acts so yeah like it worked like They're specifically targeting the type of news

that politicians will see in areas that politicians live to get them to start trying to affect change around social media, specifically the social media that kids use, and amplifying the social media that boomers use, Facebook, which already is a cesspool of spreading conservative disinformation. That's the entire bit that they're trying to do here.

And so they were working on the original September challenge. Also in October, Targeted Victory was working to spread the rumors of the Slap a Teacher TikTok challenge, which as we know, was not actually a TikTok challenge. But they, they were doing, they were also contributing to inflating this

trend which is funny because obviously they were being paid by Facebook they were being paid by the GOP and you know Facebook is the place where this actually started yeah so you know but like again if you can tie anything to like

a little bit of truth it makes whatever story you're trying to make so much more impactful, right? The firm was careful to use both genuine concerns and then just amplify them or exaggerate them into unfounded anxieties to get people to start questioning the safety of these applications. So it's a pretty clever setup they have going here, and they've been really successful. The October devious licks trend with Slap Teacher was extremely, extremely, extremely successful in terms of how they affect what is seen as truth

and how much news coverage was just kind of unconsciously and just mindlessly repeating the stuff that they've heard. The other funny thing that Targeted Victory does is they help write letters that are from concerned parents, quote-unquote, that get sent out to newspapers to be published in their letters to the editor section. Ah, yeah, there we go. Yeah, so they specifically try to write op-eds targeting TikTok and then place them around the country, especially in key congressional districts. On March 12th, a letter to the editor that targeted victory

officials helped write uh ran in the in the denver post um the letter said it was from a concerned new parent and it claimed that tiktok was harmful to children's mental health raising concerns over it's like you know data privacy and that many people suspect that china is deliberately collecting behavioral data on our kids. Oh, God. They're trying to hack our children's brains. The letter also issued support for Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser. Wise.

Wait. Weasers. I'm going to say Weasers. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Phil Weasers.

Famed fan. Founder of the band Weasers. They were. Yeah. famed fan founder of the band weezer they were yeah but they the letter issued support for him uh including his choice to join a coalition of attorneys general investigating tiktok's impact on american youths so yeah there was a very similar letter uh drafted by targeted victory again that ran in in other other kind of smaller local papers throughout the country trying to link negative news stories about tiktok that targeted uh victory had specifically sought to amplify some of the letters that were getting circulated were signed by like members of the democratic party they were they were they were signed by various politicians

in terms of like no trying to create this thing that looks grassroots to the spread then spread around be like hey we have these concerns. Do you endorse our concerns? So then they can then make it seem way more legit than just like a concerned parent. It's pretty good. An email sent a few weeks ago, Targeted Victory asked their teams to be prepared

to share the op-eds that you're working on right now. Colorado and Iowa, can you talk about the TikTok op-eds you both got? So they're specifically targeting districts where the Senate challenges are actually more of a toss-up. So specifically trying to do this whole TikTok is dangerous to the kids thing in these places. It's, yeah, it's pretty fun because none of these letters, none of these op-eds, if you read them, there's no indication that Facebook is funding them. There's no indication that the GOP is funding them, right? It is the whole like AstroTurf thing, right? it is the whole like astroturf thing right that is that is the entire idea is that they look they look totally legit so anyway that was that was my my my those those were my notes in terms of the what the dv slicks and sap teacher thing actually was and then how there was all this behind the scenes fuckery trying to inflate it and how it's specifically getting inflated to tie

into like local elections that are happening in the midterms um yeah what what thoughts what thoughts do y'all have on on these on these fun fun little uh disinformation uh rackets they have they have going on we might do like another full episode of this at some point but there's there's an interesting angle here where facebook's been sort of taking the china angle on this a lot and it's like yeah it comes up less than this but yeah you in this they they founded this uh they founded this advocacy group called i think it's american edge where they have all these things that are like uh uh that was like them and a bunch of weapons manufacturers like founded this lobbying group and they keep saying things like oh uh china is threatening our competitive edge so we can't do antitrust uh legislation if we do antitrust

legislation the russia china alliance will like defeat the u.s and so it's interesting it's like they're i know facebook seems to have like well okay so so they have this problem where like the the metaverse stuff just flops and they're like oh no we need to make money and it's like well okay so you know there's the the the the two ways to make money are you create something that people want to use and that's hard that's hard they did that once and then they accidentally turned it into an engine that breaks democracy and accelerates ethnic cleansings. You don't want them trying to make another new thing.

The other thing Targeted Victory was doing was specifically amplifying pro-Facebook content. Yeah. How Facebook is supporting local black-owned businesses and all that sort of thing. Yeah, yeah. You have that on the one hand where it's like, yeah, they're not doing anything else. The second way that you do this stuff is by strategic

sabotage of your competition and this is what facebook is doing right now is that they've launched basically full-on in strategic sabotage angle they've launched into this this sort of like preemptive defense stuff about uh antitrust being like ah hey look at china uh if we uh yeah if we don't have uh tech monopolies that doing genocides uh china will have tech monopolies doing genocides and it's like that's the other funny thing is that whenever zuckerberg gets accused of trying to create monopolies around social media he's always like but tiktok exists but no it's great because they like they like specifically say this they like their

quote is we need to get the message out that while facebook is the current punching bag tiktok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app like that that is that is the actual quote that looks like yeah they're specifically doing that exact thing yeah they're leaning into xenophobia and essentially because you can watch them sort of pushing all of the like the the political buttons of the last few years it's interesting because you can watch them sort of pushing all of the, like the, the political buttons of the last few years. It's like, they're,

they're, they're, they're basically replaying like the Trump, like the Trump right stuff, right? It's like, they, they figure out that rhetoric works.

So they're doing okay. They're doing the sort of like, uh, like they're doing sort of anti-China xenophobia. They're doing save the children. Yep. They're doing like, they're doing all of this,

like, uh, your kids are unsafe stuff and yeah it's working great for them so this is fun yeah they're definitely trying the specific things

that Targeted Victory tries to do the place that's funded by both Facebook and the GOP is that they specialize in they say they do crisis practice and corporate affairs offerings for their clients' growing need for the issues of management and executive positioning,

saying that it wants to focus on efforts to move toward authentic storytelling with a hyper-local so that is that's all the words they use to talk about how they do grassroots disinformation yeah authentic storytelling with a hyper local approach yeah faking letters from parents to local news sites who are hungry for content in order to cause a moral panic about tiktok yeah i mean on average people trust their local news way more than they trust their national news so they shouldn't because they should they should not because it's all ran by like two companies yeah uh so yeah i mean but like they have they have a

lot of money they've they've a lot of money it's they're it's they're they're one of the biggest um recipients of republican campaigns uh spending now they're receiving of the biggest recipients of Republican campaigns spending now they're receiving money from Facebook they have been for a while but they're spending more money now yeah and I think it's really important to be skeptical of online trends

because it turns out online trends can be pretty astroturfed I mean we can look right now at all of the groomer stuff right online trends do not need to be organic uh it's like i always say the next time you feel like you see something on facebook or twitter and you feel like you want to share it because it's outrageous instead just go set off a bomb at a power substation okay just simple ethical behavior that'll that that won't play into these people's hands and in terms of all the stuff that like with facebook trying to specifically demonize kids demonize tiktok um to influence elections like if you're interested in what trends kids

are actually into just just like ask them like you could talk to them like with like words and like with your mouth and use your like human ears uh because it turns out they will actually explain it because yeah if just if anyone asked a kid about this list of challenges in like october they would say no that's that's not a thing that's that's not that seems something like adults are really interested in but nope that's not actually a. That seems something adults are really interested in, but nope, that's not actually a thing. Just assume they're basically the same that kids always are, but with different technology and shit. When I was a kid in our senior class,

a bunch of kids conspired to crash a car into the little pond that was on campus because it was destructive and funny. Kids like to do destructive, funny things. Kids don't like to do whatever April egg bullshit or grab a teacher's tit. That's weird. All of the challenges that are just like sexual assaults. That's actually not

something that a lot of kids are into, it turns out. Just try to think back to being in like 10th grade and would you have giggled at this? If so, it's probably a thing some kids have done. Like it's as simple as that.

So anyway, with this is an episode we wanted to do specifically on how just like social media disinformation is trying to affect elections leading, leading, leading into the midterms. And then tomorrow we will discuss more midterm related stuff with all of this kind of stuff with all of this like disinformation stuff TikTok and Facebook stuff all kind of

just like floating in the back of our minds as we move on to talking about the midterms and why and how they might you know affect politics going forward and you know how they might affect you know stuff around climate change stuff around different you know mini collapses all of that all that good stuff so but i think as it looks like

we have we have reached the time that we need to do today so uh i believe that does it for us this week if you want to if you want to do the social medias because hey after we talked about social media for like 50 minutes yeah let's let's let's let's plug our social media uh twitter and instagram instagram owned by facebook at cool zone media and happen here pod um yeah anyway uh listen to the kids and don't believe trends bye it could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com.

Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbranch. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of riot. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.