There’s something kinda weird at Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids we ought to talk about. It starts w how CTFK president Matt Myers got trounced in a dialogue on national tv this week. 🧵THREAD
On a show called “The Doctors,” an actual physician, Dr. Michael Siegel of Tufts Univ., took Myers to the woodshed for deceiving the American public. But get this: CTFK is *promoting* the segment on its social media!
Here’s the really weird part — none of CTFK’s 26K followers on Twitter are sticking up for Myers or CTFK. The only comments are from people adding more rebuttals to CTFK’s bunk!
This is a constant pattern for CTFK. There are virtually no actual people voicing support for this so-called leader in prohibition activism. Example: this tweet hypes a big fundraiser and no 👏 one 👏 cares 👏. ZERO ENGAGEMENT!
Same on Facebook, where CTFK supposedly has 64K followers. Here’s the big announcement and the response is just…crickets.
For comparison, here’s a twitter account with a similar size following. It posts nothing but panda photos and yet this account gets far more engagement than CTFK.
It’s not like CTFK doesn’t have enough resources. There’s eight pros on the PR/digital team alone and the top guy makes $200K/year! Plus they spend millions each year on high-powered communications agencies.
And for as much as CTFK loves to complain about "evil billionaires" and “front groups,” they sure do cozy up to a lot of billionaires and act like a front group themselves.
Look closely and CTFK has all the hallmarks of what Beltway political pros call “astroturf.” They stage fake events like this one and posture like iT’s aLL aBoUt tHe kIDs. But really, it’s just grownups raking in the cash for their own agenda.
Does CTFK’s Board of Directors care that its high-paid social media team can’t even compete with photos of pandas and other bot accounts? Hell no. That’s not the point of CTFK.
Tons of their social media energy is devoted to heaping praise on fellow prohibitionists like the loathsome head of WHO and egomaniac Michael Bloomberg.
And that’s the real mission of CTFK — to act as a fake grassroots group that public officials can point to as justification for stripping adult Americans of the right to switch from cigarettes to vaping. It is political grifting, plain and simple. END
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