Is A TikTok Revolution Brewing?
Trump vows to ban the popular social media site (for national security, he says) after TikTok users troll his Tulsa rally requesting a million tickets. Will TikTokers tank Trump’s election chances as their revenge?
“I think Donald Trump was mad that teens ruined his rally in Tulsa potentially using TikTok and he’s punishing that company,” said Nilay Patel on CNBC.
Could users’ trolling of Trump’s low-turnout Tulsa rally be behind Trump’s order to shut down Tik Tok?
President Trump was excited to get back on the road and hold campaign rallies earlier this year. His kickoff to the November election was a large rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma scheduled to coincide with Juneteenth. It was a typical Trump move to troll African-Americans and fog-horn his base. The rally would take place on the same day as the Tulsa race massacre.
After Trump’s rally failed to fill the BOK Center in Tulsa, TikTok users claimed victory in ruining Trump’s start of his presidential rally campaign stops during the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.
President Trump’s campaign promised huge crowds at his rally in Tulsa, Okla., on Saturday, but it failed to deliver. Hundreds of teenage TikTok users and K-pop fans say they’re at least partially responsible.
Brad Parscale, the chairman of Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign, posted on Twitter on Monday that the campaign had fielded more than a million ticket requests, but reporters at the event noted the attendance was lower than expected. The campaign also canceled planned events outside the rally for an anticipated overflow crowd that did not materialize. — Taylor Lorenz, Kellen Browning and Sheera Frenkel, The New York Times.
Trump orders TikTok to close by September 15
Washington observers say Trump’s failure to hold a packed election rally after making announcements that a million people had reserved tickets is at the root of the President’s order to ban to social media giant popular with young American voters and others worldwide.
Trump says TikTok must close by September 15, 2020. If the social media platform wants to remain operational in the United States, Trump say the company must be bought by an American firm and a “substantial amount of money” must be paid to the U.S. Government, reports Bloomberg.
Observers say Trump is retaliating against TikTok because of his failed Tulsa rally
Nilay Patel says Trump is acting against TikTok to punish them, reports CNBC.
“I think Donald Trump was mad that teens ruined his rally in Tusla potentially using TikTok and he’s punishing that company,” said Nilay Patel on CNBC.
TikTok users and influencers have been discussing Trump’s threats to shut down their beloved platform
Adam Brown writes that TikTok users have been discussing Trump’s threats to take down their service in a Forbes article.
“A theory explaining all this has quietly and persistently circulated among TikTokers since the ban was first discussed a few weeks ago: What if this has nothing to do with China, nothing to do with national security? What if this does have everything to do with Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June?,” writes Adam Brown.
If TikTok users were able to tank a rally, will they turn their sights on Trump’s re-election campaign?
Forbes’ Adam Brown writes TikTok users say they have experience getting around online restrictions, think trolling the President was worth it, and can move their campaign to another platform.
“If TikTok goes down, it was fun while it lasted, and we did get to stick it to Donald Trump,” says Sawyer McDuffie, a rising junior at the University of South Carolina. McDuffie, 20, was an eager participant in the Trump trolling, securing two tickets online with no intentions of going. “If anything being a member of Gen Z has taught me is that no matter what rules they make, we will get around them,” he says. “Whenever they banned Instagram and Snapchat on school wi-fi [in high school] we would just get VPN. Whenever they told us we couldn’t go to certain websites on our school laptops, we would figure out a way to get around it.”
Trevor Slack, the 26-year-old in Los Angeles who also snapped up tickets, points out that influencers have already begun directing their followings to their presence on other platforms and thinks it’s likely that the anti-Trump movement that sprung on TikTok could migrate elsewhere. “There are a million other apps out there.”
I predict young (and maybe older) TikTok users will see this as a unifying moment to express their displeasure with the President’s order to close TikTok down
Shelly Banjo and Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou write TikTok users are activated and already submitting poor reviews about Trump campaign apps online.
“For Gen Z and Millennials, TikTok is our clubhouse and Trump threatened it,” said Yori Blacc, a 19-year-old TikTok user in California who joined in the app protest. “If you’re going to mess with us, we will mess with you.”
Politicians usually seek to add to their coalitions, rather than exclude
Will Trump’s campaign of exclusion of minorities with his calls for overturning anti-discrimination laws and shutting down beloved platforms, as well as demonizing immigrants and rounding up their children to be concentrated in detention centers in the midst of a pandemic help or hurt his cause? Time only tells in these days when popular vote winners can lose elections because of the way our electoral system is set up.
Trump’s base of voters keeps shrinking as his actions affect younger, older, and working age voters directly and the pandemic spreads beyond “blue” cities and into the rest of the country where his leadership failures hit home to older folks as well as parents worried about sending their children back to school.
Schools in rural areas are seeing infected students after reopening this summer.
TikTok may go down in history as just one factor in a presidential campaign loss
Could TikTok tip the election by alienating younger voters?
Or, are the cascading events of 2020 catching up to President Trump’s poll numbers?
Only time will tell.
But, I would keep an eye out to see what the TikTok users do as Trump moves to shut down their beloved social media platform. Their kids may be reading about the TikTok revolution in their history classes in the near future.
