(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) Foreign actors have been flooding TikTok, the app owned by Chinese communists, with “false” and “incendiary” videos targeting Donald Trump ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
The Wall Street Journal published its new report, in which the news source identified 91 accounts on TikTok with overseas connections posting malicious lies about Trump. The news source added that TikTok has suggested videos from the 91 accounts to its users more than 108 million times. The videos were posted on accounts in China, Nigeria, Iran and Vietnam. Nigeria was the only country that wasn’t a communist or Islamic state.
The anti-Trump videos, created using artificial intelligence, push lies about the Republican presidential nominee. For example, one of the foreign videos appeared to predict the July 13, 2024, assassination attempt against Trump. In March 2024, a suspected Nigeria-based account posted a video that claimed an “unidentified gunman” opened fire at a Trump event on March 4, 2024, just four months before the Butler, Pa., attack on Trump.
Another video falsely claimed that Melania Trump filed for divorce from her husband because she has been “struggling to cope with her husband’s persistent body odor and alleged diaper-wearing habit.” Yet another video said Trump attacked a New York judge.
The Journal found that three of the accounts’ posted videos were recorded in China, and two additional accounts had their language set to Chinese in the app, linking them directly to the communist state.
TikTok told the news source that it has yet to be determined whether the China accounts belong to a state-backed influence operation.
It is unclear what the accounts’ intent is. The Journal wrote that some may profit from their videos while others want to create tension in the American political discourse.
The news source reported that many accounts had similar, or in some cases, identical, content. Like the 91 profiles reviewed by the Journal, spam accounts often steal each other’s messaging, making it difficult to tell whether the same network runs the accounts or are unrelated copycats.
