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The white-Left Part 1: The two meanings of white

Tuesday, August 4, 2020

UPDATED: What's behind Trump's war against TikTok?

President Donald Trump held his first public rally since the coronavirus outbreak in Tulsa, OK on 20 June 2020. It was suppose to kick-off his re-election campaign. Instead, it was a big embarrassment for him.

His then campaign manger, Brad Parscale, bragged that they had a million requests for tickets. In addition to the main venue, which seated 19,000, they set up a second location with a capacity of 80,000 for the anticipated overflow crowd. In the end, only about 6,200 Trump supporters showed up. Had they made use of that sparse attendance to practice social distancing, perhaps Herman Cain would be alive today. He, and countless others likely caught COVID-19 at that “pathetic” Trump rally, where face masks were rare in the crowded lower seating.
Precisely one month after he sent out this tweet, Parscale was replaced by Bill Stephen. Before he became Trump's newest campaign manager, Stephen gained notoriety when New Jersey governor Chris Christie fired, and scapegoated, him as the aid responsible for "Bridgegate," a scheme to shutdown lanes approaching the George Washington Bridge to punish the mayor of Fort Lee, NJ for declining to support Christie's election bid. Clearly, he's a campaign manager of proven ability. He's willing to carry out the bosses illegal schemes, and take the fall if they are exposed.

One likely reason for the disappointing turnout is a prank played by K-pop fans that relied heavily on TikTok, a popular short-form video sharing app. After Trump tweeted that tickets would be available for free online, they organized a campaign, mainly on TikTok, that resulted in hundreds of thousands of tickets being ordered by people who had no plans of attending the rally.  The New York Times reported:
TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music groups claimed to have registered potentially hundreds of thousands of tickets for Mr. Trump’s campaign rally as a prank. After the Trump campaign’s official account @TeamTrump posted a tweet asking supporters to register for free tickets using their phones on June 11, K-pop fan accounts began sharing the information with followers, encouraging them to register for the rally — and then not show.
This followed similar campaigns on TikTok and Twitter, that flooded the right-wing hashtags #WhiteLivesMatter, and #ExposeAntifa, with contrary or comical tweets that were successful in drowning out the original messages of those campaigns. Variety reported:
K-Pop Fans Take Over #WhiteLivesMatter Hashtag to Drown Out Racist Posts
By Jem Aswad
3 June 2020
In an anti-racist move that demonstrates their formidable social-media power, K-Pop fans took over the hashtag #whitelivesmatter, drowning out white-supremacist messages with nonsensical or anti-racist posts. The move was met with wide approval online early Wednesday morning.

“#WhiteLivesMatter LMAO I WAS READY TO INSULT THE SH– OUT OF EVERYONE,” one poster wrote. “THEN I SAW THAT K-POP STANS ARE DESTROYING THE [hashtag], DAMN NEVER THOUGHT I’D BE THAT HAPPY SEEING K-POP FANCAM”

“Imagine trying to trend #WhiteLivesMatter like a typical racist and Kpop fans said “Not on my watch bitch,’” another wrote. More...
Then the right-wing dirty-tricks Project Veritas released their #ExposeANTIFA video series, but their message proved hard to find.😈




While the Chinese-owned TikTok video sharing service may not have any political bias, the young people, that are the biggest part of its hundred million strong user base, most certainly do. They oppose Trump, and he has good reason to think they will continue to dog his re-election chances in the months remaining before the 2020 election.

A few weeks after these TikTok users helped make a fiasco of his Tulsa rally, Trump started a campaign to ban TikTok from the United States. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News' Laura Ingraham on 6 July that they were considering a ban on Chinese social media apps, “especially TikTok.” The app has been around for almost 4 years. Pompeo didn't say what prompted the sudden interest in banning it, but the response of app's users was immediate. Time reported on 10 July:
Thousands of users of the popular video app flocked to the Apple App Store in the last few days to flood U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign app with negative reviews. On Wednesday alone 700 negative reviews were left on the Official Trump 2020 app and 26 positive ones, according to tracking firm Sensor Tower.
The Trump administration has claimed that the TikTok app represents a security threat because it contains backdoors that would allow the Chinese Communist Party to illegally access personal data on smart phones. No proof of this has been found, and those IT specialists that have investigated the app report they are confident that it contains no backdoors or exploits. Cybersecurity expert Zak Doffman addressed this on Forbes:
In recent weeks, we have seen reports emerge suggesting that TikTok is “Chinese spyware,” alleging that the app steals data from users’ devices and sends it to China. This is certainly not proven and almost certainly not true on any level, at least not in the way it is presented.
He then goes on to say, “as with all platforms of its kind, TikTok occasionally releases software with security vulnerabilities that need to be urgently fixed.” This is a universal problem, and not what the Trump administration is talking about.

Nevertheless, Trump is continuing his campaign against the app, and its parent company, Bytedance Ltd. He announced on Monday that TikTok would have to be sold to an American company by 15 September, a Tuesday, or be banned from the US. Coincidentally, this date assures that TikTok will either be shut down, or under new management, in the crucial seven week run up to the 3 November presidential election. Microsoft has shown some interest in buying the service, but Trump has poop pooped the offer. He told Microsoft’s Nadella that U.S. should get a cut “because we’re making it possible for this deal to happen,” without explaining what this cut would be, or what laws it would be based on, and suggested that “somebody else, a big company, a secure company, a very American company can buy it.” Trump is saying his government should get a big cut of the sale's price, while China is accusing the US of “smash & grab” and “officially sanctioned theft,” in this forced sale of a very successful Chinese property.

Trump @ White House Briefing, attempting to forced the sale of TikTok | 4 August 2020


While Trump never mentions the embarrassment he has suffered at the hands of TikTok users, or their fight against his re-election, the fact that it is owned by a Chinese company gives him an excuse for attacking it that fits right into his racist anti-China campaign. Still, there are many Chinese companies doing business in the US that he could go after, and he could have gone after TikTok more than two years ago, so the timing and the target aren't explained by the front page reasons.

This brings us to another way Trump is using this pressure on TikTok to his political benefit. Trump friendly Facebook, not being satisfied with the dominance its ownership of Facebook and Instagram has given it, has already tried twice to launch its own clone of TikTok, and failed. The first was a Facebook service, named Lasso, that died a quick death. The second is an Instagram app named Reels, which is expected to launch this month. If TikTok is banned from the US, Facebook's attempts to launch a similar service (Which sounds a lot like a US company stealing Chinese technology.) will likely be easier, or perhaps Facebook itself may emerge as the “other company” Trump has in mind. Either way, it could be payback for the multi-faceted pro-Trump policies of this social media giant.

Consider:

While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tells Dana Perino on Fox News “I don't think it's appropriate for Facebook to do fact-checking,” Donald Trump is spending millions of dollars on ads featuring claims that have been debunked by Facebook's own fact-checkers, and that saying something, considering it has recruited The Daily Caller, a website founded by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, to become an official Facebook fact-checker, in spite of its long history of publishing misinformation.

Hundreds of Facebook employees staged a virtual walkout over the company's decision to leave up 'inflammatory' Trump posts. When Twitter flagged this Trump tweet as 'glorifying violence':
[...] Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.
@realDonaldTrump
May 29, 2020
Zuckerberg said Facebook would allow that statement. He told Fox News, “At Facebook, we've tried to distinguish ourselves as being really strong in favor of giving people a voice and free expression.” When Dana Perino asked “I wondered if you thought that Twitter may have made the wrong decision here?” Zucherberg replied “Yeah, that's right, Dana. We have a different policy, I think, than Twitter on this. I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn't be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online.”

But, like I said, please try to post this blog to Facebook and report if the results are:
Your message couldn't be sent because it includes content that other people on Facebook have reported as abusive.
It's always “other people,” reporting some “content,” but nothing like a clue.

Facebook has a policy that prohibits misinformation on voting methods. When Zuckerberg announced the policy, he was clear that it applied to politicians, including Trump. Now that Trump is violating that policy, and posting misinformation about voting to Facebook, they refuse to enforce it. Instead, Zuckerberg appeared on Fox News and defended Trump's right to undermine the integrity of the 2020 election, “I don't think that Facebook, or Internet platforms in general, should be arbiters of truth.” Facebook changed its policies to allow Trump and other politicians to lie in ads. Again and again, Facebook has taken action to empower Trump and the right wing in violation of its own policies.

For several years, Zuckerberg has oriented Facebook's entire public policy apparatus around placating Trump and his “base.” Facebook hired former Senator Jon Kyl to produce a report about whether Facebook was biased. It didn't make the slightest effort to look for bias against liberals or the left. (hello!)

Zuckerberg recently invited a bunch of right-wing pundits to his home to discuss partnerships and free speech. The guests included Tucker Carlson, who recently said that immigrants were making America dirtier, which is a cruel irony, because here in L.A., they seem to be the one's doing all the cleaning, and Brent Bozell, who said Obama looked like “a skinny, ghetto crackhead.”

Zuckerberg announced the launch of Facebook News on a stage with a top executive in Rupert Murdoch's right-wing media empire. The head of Facebook News, Campbell Brown, continues to be involved in her own website, The 74, which she founded with the support of Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Brown used the site to write a column lavishing praise on DeVos. Brown and Zuckerberg hired a former producer for “Fox & Friends,” Trump's favorite show, to head video strategy for Facebook News. She'll be a member of Facebook News' curation team, which means she'll select what content appears in Facebook's news tab. Also, Facebook News selected Breitbart, a noxious right-wing website that was caught laundering white nationalist talking points, to be among 200 trusted news sites to include in its launch. In addition, Facebook allows The Daily Wire, another right-wing website, to operate a network of 14 large Facebook pages that purport to be independent but exclusively promote Daily Wire content. This is in clear violation of Facebook's rules. [I want to thank Judd Legum, popular.info, and the makers of this illuminating video, from which this summary of Facebook fun facts was largely plagiarized.]

Last November, there was a secret meeting between Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump. The New York Times reported it:
Last Nov. 20, NBC News broke the news that Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump and a Facebook board member, Peter Thiel, had dined together at the White House the previous month. “It is unclear why the meeting was not made public or what Trump, Zuckerberg and Thiel discussed,” the report said.

That was it. Nothing else has emerged since. Not the date, not who arranged the menu, the venue, the seating, not the full guest list. And not whether some kind of deal got done between two of the most powerful men in the world. The news cycle moved on, and the dinner became one of the unsolved mysteries of American power.
NBC News reported that it was the second meeting between Zuckerberg and Trump in a month. As Trump has said, “I'm very big on Facebook.” Don't be surprised if Facebook emerges as a contender for TikTok.

In today's White House Press Briefing the corespondent from OAN, a news outlet favored by Trump because it is to the right of Fox News, raised a question about TikTok. After making accusations that the platform encourages the “sexual exploitation of young people,” she asked would the White House be taking steps to control the content of a post-transferred TikTok. Kayleigh McEnany answered in the affirmative. Trump has used OAN to raise questions before. This one was raised to plant the idea that the White House would be restricting TikTok's content after 15 September, if it isn't banned altogether. This whole exercise is about the content that TikTok's users post, but knowing something about Trump's history, it's hard to believe it's prompted by concerns about the sexual exploitation of young people.

At the present time Trump is entirely consumed by the his re-election prospects. Beyond golf, he is currently only interested in things that will help him get re-elected. At a cost of tens of thousands of American lives, he has manipulated the federal government's coronavirus response to further his re-election. He first stopped his daily coronavirus briefings when he was convinced they were hurting his poll ratings. Then he restarted them in a vain attempt to push those ratings back up. It has nothing to do with the lives being lost in the country he was elected to lead, and everything to do with getting him re-elected. He had Bill Barr violently clear peaceful protesters from Lafayette Park for a photo op he thought would help him get re-elected. He has sent federal agents to Portland and other cities, not because he wants to bring peace to those cities, or even to bring “law and order,” but to help him get re-elected. He is slowing down the postal service, and railing against mail-in voting (except Florida 😉) because he thinks that will help him get re-elected. Why, with all of this, is he now trying to take down a company that has been operating in the US more than two years? It can only be because he thinks it is important to his re-election prospects, and his efforts reveal motives that go far beyond its use as another handy China target. That is largely a handy cover story, and a rather innovative way of using racism.

And yet TikTok has no political agenda. I was surprise, when I signed up to TikTok, and was asked to choose a topic of interest, that politics, or anything like it, was not one of the choices. So, I chose comedy. I learned later that TikTok goes out of its way to be non-political. For example, while you can post videos that are decidedly political to your homepage, they can't be circulated. Being a Chinese owned service, probably it was trying to avoid precisely the vise it has found itself in. It was to no avail, because no matter how hard TikTok tries to be apolitical, the young people who are its “base” are decidedly not. They are anti-Trump. They have made Trump, and his white supremacist allies, look like fools, and while, admittedly, that's not hard to do, they have done it with style and flair unmatched by Brad Parscale, Bill Stephen, on even Roger Stone, and if you can't beat'em, have your friends buy'em, or ban'em.

Trump isn't after TikTok because it is Chinese owned. Plenty of iconic American companies are owned by Chinese investors, including the Chicago Stock Exchange, AMC, Smithfield Foods, Legendary Entertainment Group, GE Appliances, The Waldorf Astoria, Ingram Micro, and Motorola Mobility. He's not after TikTok because its a national security risk. It's no more or less secure than any other social media company, including Facebook. TikTok isn't being punished for its sins at all. It is being punished for the sins of its users.

Clay Claiborne

UPDATES 5 August 2020:

Sarah Cooper is one particularly high profile TikTok user that Trump would like to silence, but where this story, and similar ones about Sarah Cooper get it wrong is she's not the only TikTok user Trump wants to silence. There are thousands, maybe millions! From the Huffington Post:
People Are Convinced Trump Wants TikTok Banned Because A Comedian Is Mocking Him On It

By Mary Papenfuss
3 August 2020
There’s a new conspiracy theory in town: Donald Trump wants TikTok drop-kicked out of the US because he can’t stand comedian Sarah Cooper’s blistering presidential impersonations.

Trump told reporters on Friday that he plans to ban the Chinese-owned short-form video-sharing app from operating in the US “As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” he declared aboard Air Force One. The president claimed he could use emergency economic powers to ban the app — possibly as early as Saturday. More...
Also, today Instagram launched its TikTok clone. I said sometime this month yesterday. Billboard is reporting:
Instagram Launches TikTok Competitor Reels

by Natalie Jarvey
5 August 2020
Instagram has launched a new video feature called Reels as it looks to take on fast-growing upstart TikTok.

The feature, which Instagram tested for months in countries including Brazil and India, allows users to shoot, edit and post 15-second video clips set to snippets of music or audio. The videos can be viewed via a new portal on Instagram's Explore page, which curates and personalizes posts based on a user's preferences. More...
Pavel Durov, founder and CEO at Telegram has posted an important warning about the danger Trump's TikTok grab might have on freedom on the Internet:
[T]he US move against TikTok is setting a dangerous precedent that may eventually kill the internet as a truly global network (or what is left of it). Before the US-TikTok saga, only autocratic countries like Iran, China or Russia were known for bullying tech companies into selling parts of their businesses to investors with close ties to their governments.
...
The problem with the US-TikTok case is that it legitimises an extortion tactic previously employed only by authoritarian regimes. For decades, the US has been perceived as the defender of free trade and free speech. But now that China has started to replace them as the main beneficiary of global trade, the US (or at least the Trump administration) seems to have become less enthusiastic about those values. This is regrettable, because billions of people on this planet still like the idea of an open and interconnected world.
...
Last week, Turkey introduced a bunch of laws limiting social media companies. A few years ago, the US would have had the moral right to criticise such efforts, citing freedom of speech and free trade as ideological foundations for their concerns. Today it’s less clear whether the US still has that right. Authoritarian leaders all over the world are already using the TikTok case as justification in their attempts to carve out a piece of the global internet for themselves. Soon, every big country is likely to use “national security” as a pretext to fracture international tech companies. And ironically, it’s the US companies like Facebook or Google that are likely to lose the most from the fallout.
This is a very important side of the question that I entirely neglected in my original piece.

UPDATE 6 August 2020

Trump signs executive order to ban US transactions with owners of TikTok and WeChat in 45 days

President Donald Trump issued an executive order which will ban any US companies or citizens from making transactions with ByteDance, the parent company of the video-sharing social networking service TikTok, in 45 days. Trump also issued an order taking similar action against Tencent, the Chinese company that owns WeChat. The move comes after the president told reporters on Monday that TikTok would close down unless sold to a US company.
More, later..

Related: Seven serious problems with Trump's forced sale of TikTok
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