Word spread like wildfire across social media: Tiktokkers — that is, members of the
social media platform "TikTok", who tend to be younger and produce excruciating content my teen
finds hilarious, were apparently responsible for handing President Trump probably his most
notable loss of his re-election campaign yet.
Apparently, members of the social media platform contacted the Trump campaign
and reserved tickets — thousands upon thousands of tickets — for the rally in
Tulsa, Oklahoma scheduled for Fathers' Day weekend.
But the gag was, none of them had any intention of actually attending
the rally.
The ruse was brilliant: Tiktokkers reserved tens of thousands of tickets, making
the Trump Campaign believe the rally would be well-attended.
(Reporting from The Washington Post
suggests the plan originated among TikTok users who are fans of Korean pop music — also known as K-pop.) 1
I have second-hand
information that claim the actual attendance was 6,611. The source, I was told, is
someone who actually worked the rally.
The ruse is probably also responsible for a huge sigh of relief from the city of
Tulsa. After the city made repeated requests to the campaign to not hold the rally
for fear a COVID-19 outbreak would overwhelm its emergency response and health
systems, lawsuits were filed to prevent the campaign from holding the rally.
(The campaign went so far as to make ticketholders sign waivers, releasing
the campaign of any responsibility should the attendee catch the COVID-19 disease
as a result of attendance.)
Tulsa must love TikTok today.
According to the Washington Post, the Trump Campaign immediately set to
spinning the reason for the low turnout: "The Trump campaign on Sunday sought to
blame concerns about protesters for the lower-than-expected turnout at the president’s
Tulsa rally, even though the campaign itself had raised expectations about attendance
by touting the number of people who had signed up for tickets online."
2. One can't blame the campaign about their
expectations on the tickets, though — a great many did sign up for them.
My Conclusion
The president's re-election campaign was dealt a stinging blow by the youth of
America. My surmise is the President will seek to retaliate, and his target will
be Tiktok.
The social media platform is actually a Chinese venture, which means shutting it
down will likely become the stuff of international relations. Security analyses
published months ago showed that the app employs an unusual, non-standard encryption
method, which led to speculation that China is likely collecting TikTok data.
Published reports indicated that US military forces were forbidden from installing
the app on their devices because of the discovery of the unusual encryption.
Excerpts from John Bolton's latest book, The Room Where It Happened,
either leaked online or published in part by news outlets having received advance
copies, show that President Trump has been particularly deferential to Xi Jinping,
even going so far as asking him for help in getting re-elected.
In my opinion, given Trump-Xi relations, retaliation seems unlikely, or at least
"on ice" until a time when tensions are high — but — the Trump Administration
could certainly frame the nonstandard encryption as a national security threat and
use that as justification for having SmartPhone app distributors like Apple and
Google remove TikTok from their U.S. stores, and perhaps from U.S. users' devices.
UPDATE
In my conclusion, I opined that the Trump Administration might use the discoveries
of unusual security measures as an excuse to remove Americans' access to the platform,
should tensions with China escalate.
For the past week or so, Microsoft has been in the news cycle, because the Trump
Administration asked them to consider acquiring TikTok from its Chinese parent company;
3
also this week, the President announced that TikTok will be removed from app stores by
mid-September.
4
Actually, I think the deal could ultimately be a good thing for Microsoft. For one thing,
it'd certainly give them an opportunity to market their gaming console business; they
might even find ways to tie them in somehow, with letting gamers push gameplay videos
out over the platform. I'm just saying there are business opportunities there for them
after they get the data capture, storage, and encryption messes worked out.
Still, Microsoft didn't seek out this opportunity... and shelling out $50BB to host
really stupid videos for the sake of national security is quite an "ask."