“TikTok staying put is a threat to the Meta,” said Katie Harbath, founder of tech consultancy Anchor Change and a public policy director at Facebook until 2021.

At times, Zuckerberg has personally agitated against TikTok, including, according to the Wall Street Journalat a private dinner with Trump at the time of his Georgetown lecture. But lobbying has mostly been handled by a network of proxies and arm’s-length advocacy groups, funded discreetly by Meta.

One group, Targeted Victory, run by a former Republican Party spin doctor, worked to undermine TikTok by contacting newspapers to highlight stories that raised “genuine concerns and unfounded concerns” about the app in 2022, according to the Washington Post.

At the time, a spokesperson for Meta said: “We believe that all platforms, including TikTok, should face scrutiny commensurate with their growing success.” A source says Meta had “100pc” orchestrated a lobbying effort against TikTok.

Meta also supported another advocacy outfit, the American Edge Project, with a reported donation of $34m (£27m). The group has repeatedly flagged concerns that the US is losing ground to China in the technology sector.

In 2022, Doug Kelly, its CEO, wrote a blog alleging TikTok’s use of third-party trackers posed a “tremendous security risk”. He added that US policymakers must ensure “that a popular app owned by a Chinese tech giant does not secretly share petabytes of behavioral data about Americans with the Chinese Communist Party”.

TikTok has always denied sharing data with China and Bytedance, its owner, has said it is incorporated in the Cayman Islands, although its headquarters are in Beijing.