(HorizonPost.com) – Donald Trump joined the Chinese-based video-sharing app TikTok on June 1 and within a day had already reached 3 million followers, ten times the followers the Biden campaign has amassed since joining the platform in February.
Both presidential candidates are hoping the popular platform will help them attract younger voters, despite both taking steps to ban the Chinese-owned platform as president.
Trump’s first TikTok post was a video of the former president being greeted by the raucous crowd at a UFC title bout in Newark. By Sunday, the video had received over 56 million views.
President Biden has yet to launch his own account on the platform. Instead, his campaign launched @BidenHQ.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said that the campaign would “leave no front undefended.”
Cheung said that Trump’s TikTok presence represented the campaign’s “continued outreach to a younger audience” and that launching the former president’s TikTok account at the UFC title bout where Trump “received a hero’s welcome” was the best place to do it.
Despite Trump’s previous support for banning the platform in the United States over national security concerns, the former president justified his TikTok account by saying that he would “use every tool” at his disposal to “speak directly with the American people.”
An analysis of TikTok found that pro-Trump posts outpaced pro-Biden posts nearly two to one since November 2023.
Donald Trump Jr. has long been on the video-sharing app. The SuperPAC MAGA Inc. also joined the platform.
In late April, President Biden signed into law a bill requiring Chinese-based ByteDance to divest from TikTok to prevent the app from being banned in the United States. The law gave the company nine months to sell. However, the president can extend the deadline another 90 days if he determines that divestiture is in progress.
ByteDance is challenging the law in court. The US District Court of Appeals in Washington fast-tracked the challenge last month, scheduling oral arguments for September.
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