Trump is running attack ads against TikTok now

Move over, Huawei. Beat it, Twitter. The Trump administration has anointed a new tech bogeyman: the viral dance app TikTok.

Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram pages are running four advertisements warning that “TikTok is spying on you!” and saying Americans deserve privacy. The ads link to a survey asking whether users think Trump should ban TikTok in the U.S., and then, of course, prompting survey takers to donate to the Trump campaign.

New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz first spotted the ads, which anyone can view in the Facebook Ads Archive.

TikTok is just the latest social media company that Trump has attacked to drum up donations. His campaign briefly ran ads against Snapchat and Twitter for “meddling” in the 2020 elections. Social media companies are a favorite target for Republicans, who stoke their base’s outrage when they (baselessly) claim these platforms “censor conservative voices.” 

However, the TikTok attack is a horse of a different color. The Chinese company ByteDance owns TikTok, which has raised national security concerns over whether the app might be sending U.S. user data to China. TikTok says it does not do that, nor would it comply with requests. However, a broad 2017 Chinese law requires companies to comply with national security data gathering requests when asked. 

Coincidentally, or not so much, over the past month, Trump administration officials have glommed on to anti-TikTok sentiment as politicians and private companies alike have warned employees against using it. Tensions with China are currently high, as the Trump administration continues to blame the country for the spread of coronavirus. There’s also the fact that K-Pop fans-turned-activists used TikTok to mess with the Trump campaign in a way that may have seriously screwed up attendance at the President’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Earlier in July, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the administration was considering a TikTok ban.

A security flaw, discovered by researchers in March, is providing Trump with fodder for targeting TikTok. TikTok, as well as many other apps and news sources (including Fox News), is able to read and gather data from the clipboard of an iPhone (that’s the space where things you have cut, copied, or pasted are stored). Apple has still not fixed the flaw in its latest version of iOS.

Despite the broad nature of the flaw, the Trump campaign is specifically invoking TikTok’s connection to the clipboard vulnerability in its ads. 

“TikTok has been caught red handed by monitoring what is on your phone’s clipboard,” the ads read. “Sign the petition now to BAN TikTok.”

Aside from the fact that many other apps are party to this flaw, it’s not clear how dangerous it is. There is no evidence that TikTok is actually collecting this data. Additionally, TikTok says it only stores American user data on servers in the U.S. and Singapore, and does not send data to China. But cool, sign the BAN!

Another ad reads “Dear TikTok, Americans deserve privacy.” As much as this might be true, the Trump administration and Republicans have repeatedly eroded online privacy in this administration and over the years. The sentiment that Trump cares about Americans’ online privacy is, how you say, laughable.

The TikTok offensive looks similar to another recent Trump campaign against a Chinese company. The Trump administration has been ousting Chinese-owned tech firms Huawei and ZTE from the U.S., citing the same general privacy concerns about the companies’ Chinese ownership. There’s also the fact that Huawei was gunning to build out the world’s 5G networks — business the Trump administration would prefer to go to an American company.

There’s a lot we don’t know about how TikTok’s Chinese ownership might affect everything from personal privacy to national security. However, using its potential threat to iPhone users’ privacy as outrage-stoking fodder seems like a cheap play for clicks, email signups, and campaign donations at best.