In recent years, Chinese hackers have stolen information from Americans in some major heists. Marriotts just experience one of the largest data breaches ever, affecting half a billion of its customers. We're talking about email addresses, date of birth. So what exactly does that hack mean for you? Equifax is a consumer monitoring company. It's reported this gigantic cyber breach, and
we mean gigantic. We don't know exactly what these hackers want with this information, but clearly they wanted it badly enough to steal it. We spoke to Claudia being Catty. I am an economist. I was working on cyber security in the financial sector. She specializes in these kinds of cyber attacks, and one day she got an idea. What if these governments didn't have to hack into the databases
or do something illegal to get people's personal information. What if they just invented an addictive app that was fun to use that people would willingly hand over their information to. I started to worry about what my look like a perfectly legal activity, like any app that collects data, could be a conduit for sending data to a hostile government.
And then she heard about TikTok. So I was reading a lot of news about TikTok, this new Chinese social app that had times of minions of downloads and was stopping the charts. So there you had it. The Chinese government had the possibility of requesting personal data from location, behavioral data, photo identification through the TikTok videos, or millions of people overseas without even needing to carry out a cyber attack. It looked to me that this was extremely dangerous.
So she wrote a paper where she wore Western governments that ignoring TikTok could be disastrous, that TikTok could be used for sp manage and to manipulate public opinion. Claudia says that what really cut her eye were videos of U S soldiers on TikTok. Many of them are teenagers using TikTok for fun. They did push up contests, they made dance videos. Oh sorghe were you in the Marine Corps? Yeah? A question question, but dare you kill? But Claudia saw
a big national security problem. The so called military TikTok was distinct a subgroup of users, quite successful as an app for very young recruits, find the bad guys and of course, not all of these very young soldiers were aware of the fact that they were potentially sending data to China. And of course you really don't want this data to be disclosed to any private company. But of course it's even worse if you're doing that with a
with a feign country. You're listening to Foundering, I'm your host, Shelley Banjo. Up until now, we've been telling you all about the rise of TikTok and how an app from China hit it big on the world stage for the first time ever. But TikTok's fortunes were changing quickly. By the company would find itself a target of US politicians, security experts, even Black Lives Matter activists. Many of the fears about TikTok came down to politics. TikTok's owner, Byte Dance,
is a Chinese company. Critics feared any tech company from China, especially one built on such advanced AI technology, because it could mean that very personal data of Americans could wind up in the hands of the Chinese government, and that Chinese style censorship could mold a generation of young, politically savvy Americans. These fears reached a fever pitch and threatened to take the whole company down. We'll tell you more
after this break. By now, most of us are resigned to the fact that tech companies are tracking our every move um At this point, I feel like I've been on social media. I grew up around computers and phones. I'm actually not that upset about my data being like quote unquote stolen, are being sold because I understand, like we live in a in an age where technology knows everything about you, Like that's kind of a given. That's Mila Delatre, She's nineteen. She was kind enough to step
in as our teenager in residence. I think I'm just so used to like, Oh, Facebook's watching you, Instagram's watching you, Like all your ads are so directed towards you because they read your text. So then what's the big deal about TikTok. It's just another tech company, right, except that it's owned by a company in China. And in China, all companies are required by law to hand over any information the government asks for. This isn't just some hypothetical fear.
About twenty years ago, Yahoo gave the Chinese government information about someone posting online about democracy. The guy was sentenced to a decade in prison. So far, there's no indication this is happening with TikTok. A company spokesperson told me that people in China can't use TikTok. There's a separate Chinese version, and TikTok's data is stored in the US and Singapore. So the company says that American data isn't readily available to China. But still, the laws in China
put TikTok in a tricky position. They can swear up and down that they're not handing over data to the Chinese government, but it's impossible to prove something is not happening or that it won't happen in the future. Here's Claudia, What I actually believe is that they have no way to prove that they are in a position to say not to the Chinese government. So I might believe that they want to, I actually have no grounds on which
to believe they can. If the controversy around TikTok seems over the top, it's because in many ways, TikTok became a symbol for a deeper conflict. Donald Trump rose to power by blaming a lot of America's problems on China. As president, he sparked in nasty trade war and a campaign against China's most high profile targets. It's tech giants,
including bitte Dance, TikTok's parent company. So when Claudia being Cotti's paper came out saying that TikTok is the Chinese company we need to worry about, its set off a frenzy. The US, UK, Australian and Indian governments all started investigating TikTok. The U S military banned their members from using the platform, a number of users sued the app, and all these accusations started flying around about TikTok and their Chinese founders.
TikTok pushed back at these accusations, but many powerful people just didn't believe them. Here Senator Marco Rubio, he's one of TikTok's earliest and loudest critics. All these companies will tell you the same thing. We don't turn over data. It is the law in China that you turn over data when they ask you for it. And all the engineers that work for byte Dance that ultimately have the keys to to whatever it is they're storing in the US,
if they want that data, they can get it. I spoke to Marco Rubio after he asked for a formal investigation into TikTok from a government committee called SIPHIAS. SIPHIAS stands for the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US. So if you're an American business and you want to make a deal with a company from say China or Poland, then SIPHIUS might look at your deal to see if
there are any risks to national security. But usually they focus on deals involving stuff like nuclear power, not social networks. So Bye Dances CEO John Ming never thought he needed to get approval from SIPHIUS. Plus, when Bye Dance bought musically and folded the app into TikTok, this was one Chinese company buying another Chinese company, so it was a big surprise. When Syphia started investigating TikTok, they said TikTok had such a big base of American users that it
warranted review. The investigation caught TikTok off guard, and it also caught Senator Rubio into some trouble at home with his teenage sons. Just laughing, I put something out on Instagram like a month and a half ago about if you want your all your data going to China, leave your kids on TikTok. So parents at the school al saw and make their kids delete TikTok, and so now the kids are kind of upset at my kids because of me putting that out there and that sort of deal.
It's a pretty funny situation, but it also speaks to how hard it is to make kids get rid of the app. Even Marco Rubio could hardly do it. After Rubio started talking about TikTok, other u S lawmakers piled on. Democrats and Republicans united in the push against TikTok. Senators Chuck Schumer and Tom Cotton asked for a national security review, and Senator Josh Holly pass legislation to ban all you as federal employees from downloading TikTok. We interviewed Holly back
in September. This was months before he stoked election conspiracies that inspired the deadly riot on Capitol Hill. Well, TikTok, as I think, in a uniquely invasive app. In many ways, there is no reason TikTok needs to collect key strokes. There's no reason that TikTok or any other app like that needs to have access to your contact list. To your text messages, to your browsing history, your location history,
none of that. To Holly, giving data to TikTok was the equivalent of giving it straight to the Chinese Communist Party. Bye Dance has Chinese Communist Party members as part of its executive leadership structure, and we know that Byte Dance actually pledged publicly to Beijing that they would be good citizens, uh good you know, communists, and would allow the Chinese Communist Party access to to Bite Dance leadership. Again, there's no indication that TikTok has passed along American data to
the Chinese government. But anti TikTok sentiment was building, and there was one person in particular who was cheering Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg for years. Zuckerberg saw TikTok grow, becoming a major competitor, drawing people away from Facebook and Instagram. So Zuckerberg decides to issue his own warning to Washington. He had been called up to Congress to defend accusations that Facebook had gotten too big. Instead, he uses as his
chance to deflect attention to China. Here Senator Dan Sullivan from Alaska questioning Zuckerberg. Mr. Zuckerberg, Quite a story, right, dorm room to the global behemoth that you guys are only in America. Would you agree with that, Senator, mostly in America and you couldn't do this in China, right or what you did in years? Well, Senator, there are there are some very strong Chinese internet companies, right, But
you're supposed to answer yes to this question. Okay, come on, trying to help you, right, I mean, give me a break. The answer is yes, okay, so thank you. Um. The senators are all laughing, but Suckerberg is looking ahead, barely blinking with a super straight face. Because Suckerberg came before Congress with very specific talking points that Chinese internet companies like TikTok needed to be stopped. He says the issue is bigger than Facebook and that the rise of China's
tech companies were huge threat to America. Is face. One of the key issues here is Facebook too powerful? Are you too powerful? And do you think you're too powerful? Well? I think most of the time when people talk about our scale, they're referencing that we have two billion people in our community. And I think one of the big questions that we need to think through here is the vast majority of those two billion people are outside of the US, and I think that that's something that, to
your point, that Americans should be proud of. And when I brought up the Chinese internet companies, I think that that's a real, a real strategic and competitive threat that in in American technology. We can see another thing here real quick, I want to I don't want to interrupt, but this was a huge one eight for Zuckerberg. He spent years trying to get into the good graces of
the Chinese government because Facebook was banned in China. He learned Mandarin and bragged about speaking to China's president Shi Jimping. He was so confident about winning China over, but none of it worked, and Zuckerberg eventually gave up. He shifted gears, and China became the enemy. In a later speech at
Georgetown University, Zuckerberg named TikTok directly. While our services like WhatsApp are used by protesters and activists due to strong encryption privacy protections on TikTok, the Chinese app growing quickly around the world, mentions of these same protests are censored even here in the US. Is that the internet that we want? We'll be right back TikTok has been haunted by the question of what they're doing with all the data they collect. The media, regulators, world leaders, and even
TikTok users won't let up. I spoke to John Boyd Bolton, a former Bite Dance employee. We heard from him in a previous episode. Well, I mean it's upsetting for me because I know them. I have friends that work there, and you know this could hurt them. Um, I really don't think there's a national security threat. I just because of the way I know Yimming and that team. They're really trying to build a great company. And I don't think they're a national security threat. I don't. I don't that.
I think there's other things at play here. John told me the investigations around TikTok seemed politically motivated. He worked with By Dances CEO John ki Ming, and he just felt that Eaming worked too hard to put his business in danger. China would totally compromise them if they did that, and I don't think China wants to do that. I think they're smart to know, like, yeah, let's this is the first real Chinese tech company to be successful outside
of the Chinese borders, particularly in America. I think, what kind of user data are they going to get that actually helps them do anything. You can hear the sympathy in John's voice for Yu Ming. John helped Eming buy up US startups. It was part of Ming's grand plan to achieve his dream of becoming the first consumer tech company from China to make it bigg around the world.
The great irony is that once Eeming succeeded at becoming a history making CEO, the American politicians were saying, whoa wait a second, we don't want a Chinese guy to run the most popular app in America. So by the end of twenty nineteen, you mean came up with a new idea. He decides to rebrand TikTok as an American company instead, and Jiman puts a lot of money into it. He ramps up hiring in the US and puts a
bunch of Washington lobbyists on salary. He moves TikTok's content moderation out of China, and he tells his team in Beijing he wants a major revamp. Should we set up TikTok's global headquarters outside of China? Should we sell a stake in the company to an American investor, should we do an IPO in New York. It was all on the table, and there was one more PR push I thought was pretty funny. Like a lot of companies, TikTok
is incorporated in the Cayman Islands. But TikTok started saying they were based in the Cayman Islands, even though they had few, if any employees there, and their PR team starts calling up journalists, including me and my colleagues and chewing us out when we called TikTok a Chinese company. Any So, in November, TikTok agrees to sit down interview with The New York Times. But even though John ki Ming is the big boss in Beijing, TikTok sent Musically's
founder Alex jew Alex was back. He had taken a few months off after the big TikTok launch in the US, but Eming asked him to return. Ray John, the New York Times reporter who wrote the story, said it was the first time anyone was able to get Alex on the record to answer the question that was on everyone's mind. I asked very directly, if Seating Ping approached you, Alex drew and asked for asked you to collect data on Americans? What would you do? And he and he sort of
said I would turn him down. He's just really immediately answered, didn't really even take take a moment to think about it. It seems like a cut and dry response from Alex. Right, of course, TikTok wouldn't share data with the Chinese government, And isn't this what Americans wanted to hear? But it Race says, the response from Alex totally backfired. Many people
simply didn't believe him, and the interview just raised more questions. Yeah, ultimately, maybe it's just because he's not eating he's not the absolute head of the company. He's not you know, he is ultimately still reporting to Eaming and he he's only in charge of TikTok, and maybe he could say um uh. Even if I say no, Eming might still love to say yes. And in fact, I think the next thing Alex said after I asked the question was but I don't think cheating p would ever ask me Um to
do those things. And I don't know if he meant that in the sense that he would know cheating would never approach me. Lowly, Alex drew Um to ask for such things, or if he meant that cheating Pie would never want data on Americans. I'm not sure. Even though Alex was in charge of Tiktokiming was the ultimate boss for years, Eaming shied away from interviews with Western media. He he's never said on the record that he would turn down China's leader Shi Jimping. This was a difficult
situation for TikTok. Here's my colleague Chipping Huang. They have to show the world that they say something never happened, but they have to prove that never happened. How can improve something that has never happened. A TikTok spokesperson told me that Eming has never been in charge of the day to day operations at TikTok and that the company
doesn't share data with the Chinese government. To try to smooth things over in Washington, Ming wanted to send Alex to d C to speak directly with politicians and convince them that TikTok wasn't an nefarious actor. So Alex lined up a number of meetings with U. S senators, including
Holly and Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn. There was a lot of build up news reports came out announcing these meetings, but at the last minute, Alex got cold feet and didn't show up at the time, Senator Holly tweeted, TikTok just canceled their meeting with me this week. Willing to answer questions get a call from Beijing. TikTok, one of the world's most valuable tech startups, has postponed multiple meetings scheduled on Capitol Hill this week, canceled, rescheduled, delayed. What's
going on. We're told these are delayed and that they will be rescheduled in the new year. Of course, some of these senators are curious why they pulled the plug, but in theory, we should be hearing about these again in TikTok never did reschedule the meetings. When I asked why, a TikTok spokesperson told me they fell through because it was just before Christmas and most folks weren't available to meet. But other sources told me that Alex didn't go to
Washington because he just didn't want to go. They didn't feel comfortable. Here's Rama, a former tech banker who's followed by Dance for years. I mean, just like just looking at the man right he's a little bit more like a Jack Dorsey, you know, very sort of alternative. He's not like the He just doesn't seem like the guy who wants to suit up and go in front of Congress.
This is a terrible look for Alex. His main job at that point was trying to make American lawmakers feel more comfortable with TikTok, not ghosting a bunch of senators. At this point, Alex was on the cusp of losing his job. Right around that time, Meaning hired a well known American recruiting firm to start looking for a new CEO for TikTok. Eming wanted an American face at the top.
I had heard in two thousand nineteen that Jim was spending a ton of time in the US looking for a CEO to lead TikTok, and this person took him a really long time to find because they were hoping for someone with d n A in both technology, entertainment and also of course the political connections that you know, might be necessary to ensure the app success in the US. So if you think about it, someone with San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington d C networks and expertise would
just be very very difficult to find. Okay, If the first thing on Eming's wish list was an American CEO, the next thing was finding an American tech company to form an alliance with and serve as an ally in TikTok's campaign to win over Washington. So in December, you Mean flies to Seattle for a secret visit with Microsoft CEO such An Adela. You Mean and Satya overlap briefly during ming short stint at Microsoft, and even though Bye Dance and Microsoft made for strange bedfellows, Eming wanted to
propose a partnership that they could both benefit from. Here's my colleague, Dina Bass, She's covered Microsoft for more than twenty years. If you're Bye Dance, that you're going to be thinking about is how do I find someone that is going to create a relationship that helps me with my problems with the US government, that's credible with with Congress, that's credible with President Trump. And Microsoft is a good
choice for them because of that. Microsoft didn't have a lot of experience in social media, and you Mean saw that as a good thing. He thought he could trust such An Adela. I think for a Bite Dance perspective, they didn't want to work with anyone who could be a competitor, and I think that rules out Google because of YouTube and google significant social media presence there, Microsoft has really nothing to speak of in the social media area. In return, you mean dangle the promise of storing byte
dance massive amounts of data with Microsoft's cloud business. This meeting hasn't been reported on, but it was important because it laid the groundwork for a much bigger discussion about Microsoft and TikTok joining forces down the line, and then later leaving hopped on a plane for Davos to attend the World Economic Forum. It was a personal triumph for Eming, who finally got to rub shoulders with the likes of
Sundar Pichai and Cheryl Sandberg. TikTok was a hot topic of conversation at Davis that year, although you mean didn't headline any big events, other influential people defended TikTok on stage four for him. There's another factor though, that I'm hearing is I'm meeting with CEOs of Chinese companies that are growing. Do they want to be positions in the world as a Chinese company or do they want to
be positioned in the world as a global company. That's David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, talking to Bite Dances board member Bill Ford about TikTok's rebranding. It's a great point for two reasons. If you take if you take Bite Dance million daily active users six fifty or TikTok outside the Chinese firewall. And when we talk about a lot at the board, is a global internet company with Chinese heritage as opposed to a Chinese internet company.
I think that is exactly right. So the CEO of General Atlantic, who's also one of Bite dances biggest investors, is on stage pushing the idea that TikTok wasn't a Chinese company. He's saying, it's not Chinese, it's global. Here's my colleague Chipping. The biggest reason, and maybe the only reason people have doubts people can trust trains tech companies is that they are from a cone tree that is not a democracy. It's the Communist Party. It's the Chinese
coleman who had a final boss. What can you do as a business, You try your best to shake off that image. After Davos Ming took his young daughter and wife who also works at By Dance, on a trip throughout Europe. Sources told me that despite his dreams of creating a global company, Ming hadn't traveled much for fun
outside of China. It was Iman's last days to freedom before the whole world would change, because just as he was indulging in a European getaway, a deadly virus was spreading throughout China in what would turn into the fatal coronavirus pandemic, killing millions throughout the world. Wuhan, China, ground zero for the outbreak, now under lockdown. Most of the seventeen dead and more than five hundred second are in Wuhan. Since Friday, the number of known infections across Asia has
more than quadrupled. Every mode of transport out of the city grind to a halt, claims trains, buses, ferries, and subways. China was the first country to go into COVID lockdown.
So you Mean and his family decided not to go home. Instead, they go from their European vacation to California, where you Mean meets with his American investors and spend time interviewing candidates for the top job at TikTok When it became clear that COVID was virtually contained in China, he flew back to Beijing, but the virus was overtaking the US and Europe. People around the world, including President Trump, are blaming China for the pandemic, calling it the China virus
because it originated there. But in a twist of fate, because of COVID, TikTok's business had never been better. People were locked in their homes with little to do and turned to TikTok as an escape. For the first time, adults start downloading TikTok in huge numbers. The search made it clear that TikTok wasn't just for teenagers anymore. It
was a sensation across generations. You Mean felt even more pressure to hire an American CEO, and this was when a former executive from Disney came onto Eman's radar for the top job, Kevin Mayer. Sources told me that you Mean made a list of the top three candidates and Kevin wasn't on it. But you Mean felt he needed to move fast to slap an American face on top of TikTok. So he rushed to hire Kevin because at
the very least he looked good on paper. When the news broke that Kevin Mayor had been hired, I was I think reading Chinese news actually, and it was just really hilarious how they just described him as Captain America. The reaction was that Kevin is this you know, six foot, really polished, really good looking, um and buff, you know former football player who graduated from m I t uh so, Yeah, he like really ticked all the boxes of the all
American um male you know business executive. I guess Kevin had work to Disney for more than twenty years. He launched Disney, plus he had a lot of experience in China, but he was passed over for the top job at Disney, and TikTok was a chance to run another successful global company and it came with a hefty paycheck. A TikTok spokesperson disputed this characterization. She told me Eming didn't feel pressure to hire a CEO because he was not in
charge of TikTok's day to day operations. They will point out that hiring a CEO is hardly an everyday task. It's a high level decision, and Meming was notorious for aggressively recruiting top executives. As for the current head of TikTok, Alex Jew, he sort of fades into the background, his life's work overshadowed by the fact that he was Chinese and that he wasn't able to clean up TikTok's reputation
in Washington, which is what Eming wanted from him. Here's where Ima, the former tech banker, he just wanted, you know, as he wanted an executive and charge that was as American as it gets. Like Alex Drew, even though he had spent a lot of time in the US, was still like a Chinese American, right, So they really wanted someone who was unquestionably American through and through. But Kevin Mayer was in for a hard time. We'll be right back. The new TikTok CEO, Kevin Mayer had a harrowing first
day on the job. It was June one. All over the U S black Lives Matter protesters took to the streets over the killing of George Floyd, and many of them tried to use TikTok to spread their message. But there was a problem because TikTok videos with Black Lives Matter and George Floyd hashtags got little to no views. People were furious they were trying to speak out against racism and finding the self silenced. I was very, very,
very upset. There's so some of the other creators I know, mostly people of color, We were all talking about it, just because it was upsetting to see that the platform was like where we felt like we could be open and stuff could would suppress something like that, something so massive. That's Darius Jackson, a nineteen year old who spends about four hours a day on TikTok. He says TikTok issued
an apology. They said they weren't censoring Black Lives Matter videos, that it was a technical glitch, But Darius and many other TikTok ER's didn't buy it. It felt like they were apologizing because they were caught, not because they were apologizing because they felt bad about it. Censorship like this is wrong. It could uh mess up the perception of what's truly going on or how we truly feel about
certain things, you know. These accusations of political censorship resurfaced deep fears about TikTok that many people had been harboring for years, that China might be manipulating content to influence the world view of Americans. We spoke to a former TikTok employee, Chu June Chin. He helped TikTok set up operations in Southeast Asia and train people on content moderation, so we became somewhat of an expert on how TikTok sensors videos. He says that for TikTok, censorship was generally
a feature, not a bug. Woman's are gonna industry. We don't allow national leaders or political figures to appear in videos from any country. It's not only China, but in any country we operate, at least during my stay. TikTok is very neutral. It never involves itself in politics. It positions itself as a peer entertainment platform. It's not like Facebook, which constantly influences the US elections. On Facebook, you go okay,
so they dig at Facebook aside. He said it was policy at TikTok to steer clear from controversy at least when it comes to our rules about censorship, we tend to be pretty conservative. We take down anything that seems sensitive and we don't touch politics. I saw this firsthand when I was living in Hong Kong and covering the massive pro democracy protests against China and the Hong Kong government. I went out on the street with a gas mask
in one hand and my phone and the other. Both journalists and protesters were actively documenting the tear gas, water cannons and marches online, and the protesters I spoke to lived on social media on Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Telegram. But when I opened up TikTok and searched for Hong Kong, I got zilch no protest content at all. Instead, under the Hong Kong hashtag, I saw videos of the city
skyline and girls dancing at tourist destinations. We asked a few of the Hong Kong protesters about this, say so, I think TikTok must be censoring and scrutinizing videos because China is sensitive to all the political content. They want to maintain the social and political stability in the country. If the Chinese government wants to get your user information, they will find a way to get it. These are young activists who protested against China's increasingly restrictive control over
Hong Kong. They didn't want to give us their full names. Amy is twenty and Sam's twenty two because TikTok is funded by a Chinese company, there has to be concerned in doubt regarding the data safety. There are concerns that TikTok transfers user information to mainland China. I'm afraid to use it because TikTok is owned by a Chinese company and the Chinese government can use the app as a tool to track my location. I'm worried that they can go after me, so I have to protect my personal
safety and to leave the app. I went download TikTok again. The reason why these young people sound so afraid is because the threat to them is not theoretical. In Hong Kong, dozens of teens have been arrested for the things they've said online. Many of the protesters were afraid of posting on TikTok, but there was also something else going on. You look on those hashtags and TikTok and there was just a total silence. That's Daniel Sinclair. He's an independent
researcher who studies TikTok. As an experiment, he downloaded some Hong Kong protest videos from the Internet and tried posting them on TikTok. But in instances where I had tested weeks later after they posted that um it was not going through, or if it was going through, it would take hours days. That's something that doesn't happen to other social media in the US, to Twitter, to Facebook. At the heart was this ability for TikTok to moderate and
gate content before it ever reached users. A TikTok spokesperson told me the app wasn't censoring videos about Hong Kong, and months later they shut down the app in Hong Kong entirely. TikTok has faced many censorship allegations over the years that they suppressed videos of fat people, queer people, people who have spoken out about the Chinese government, and TikTok's answer to these accusations has been, yes, we used
to take a blunt approach to moderation. They also previously admitted to pushing down content that promoted conflict, but they say that's changed. Their spokesperson gave us a statement, we continually evolve our policies and approach to protect against emerging harmful content, and this is where TikTok reverse course. After Black Lives Matter activists accused the platform of censorship, TikTok
started promoting protest videos. In the span of a few months, gen z activism exploded, giving rise to the term TikTok to vist. It didn't take long for teens to realize they could use TikTok not just to talk about politics, but to organize on the platform. I recommend all of those of us that want to see this nineteen thousand seat auditorium barely filled or completely empty, go reserve tickets now and leave him standing there alone on the stage. What do you say, guys? Donald Trump is having a
rally next week and it's free. So I got two tickets and I just verified it too, so that means there's gonna be at least two empty spots. Guys, that's awful. Oh my god. I'm just registered for Trump's rally and I'm so excited to not go. The chain succeeded in getting Trump's attention in a big way. Here's Darius Jackson,
the nineteen year old we heard from earlier. Donald Trump is not very well liked on that app, especially so if enough people own that app saying something or just doing like one what it took maybe three to five minutes to sign up for a seat like that's three to five minutes out of your day, like we had the time the TikTok users had embarrassed the president. TikTok users may well be President Trump's latest adversary. Thousands of people who'd gotten tickets online didn't show up. Trump was
said to be furious. Was President Trump's fiasco of a rally and Tulsa sabotage by an army of teenagers. Some officials in the Trump administration saw this as an opening. They were looking for a way to punish China for the global spread of coronavirus. Here's Trump talking to TV host Gretave Ancestra. In Secretary Pompeo was talked about possibly banning TikTok in this country. China is something we're looking at. Yes, why why would you ban it? Well, it's a big
business China. Look what happened with China with this virus. What they've done to this country and to the entire world is disgraceful, and we are looking at numerous different things. TikTok's one of them. One of many people told me that when the news got back to ye Ming, he was in the middle of eating breakfast at his home in Beijing. A friends and over a link to the news, and Yeming was confused. He said, China virus. What did
the coronavirus have to do with TikTok? It was bizarre to target an app like TikTok as a way to get back at China for the pandemic, But that's exactly what Trump said he would do. And then a few weeks later, right as Trump was about to board his helicopter, We're looking at TikTok. We may be banning TikTok, we might be doing some other things. Are a couple of options. That's next time on the season finale of Foundering. Foundering is hosted by me Shelley Banjo. Sean Wyn is our
executive producer. Raymondo is our audio engineer. Molly Nugent is our associate producer. Additional reporting by Tom Giles, Josh Bruce, Team Chipping Huang, Felix Tam and Dina Bass. Production helped from Michael Tobin and Bertie Ford. Special thanks to Edwin Chan and Davey Kim. Our story editors are Mark Million, Anne vander May, and Alistair Barr. Francesca Levi is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. Be Sure to subscribe, and if
you like our show, leave a review. Most importantly, tell your friends see you next time.