Though the United States government is on track to ban TikTok by January, both presidential candidates are now on the app, with former president Donald Trump on Saturday joining President Joe Biden.
Roughly a day since joining TikTok, Trump had attracted 3 million followers on the short-video platform, which is owned by ByteDance in Beijing.
Trump posted a launch video on his account, which has the address@realdonaldtrump, on Saturday night. The video, which had 56.4 million views as of Sunday evening, showed Trump greeting fans at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey.
"The president is now on TikTok," UFC CEO Dana White said, introducing Trump in the video.
"It's my honor," Trump replied.
Biden's election campaign goes by the user name "bidenhq" and has 340,000 followers as of Sunday evening. He signed legislation in April that would ban the app if Byte-Dance does not sell it.
Saturday's UFC event was Trump's first public outing since a jury in New York found him guilty on Thursday on 34 charges of falsifying business records as part of a plan to influence the 2016 presidential election by covering up hush-money payments.
Trump has maintained he did nothing wrong and plans to appeal the verdict. He faces sentencing on July 11.
Law challenged
ByteDance is legally challenging the law that requires it to sell TikTok by next January or face a ban. The White House said it wants to see China-based ownership ended on purported national security grounds.
TikTok has contended that it will not share U.S. user data with the Chinese government and that it has taken substantial measures to protect the privacy of its users.
Trump attempted to ban TikTok in 2020 when he was president, but was blocked by U.S. courts on First Amendment grounds. But in March this year, although Trump said he agreed with some national security concerns, he also said a ban would hurt some people financially and help Meta Platforms' Facebook, which Trump has regularly criticized.
"Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it. There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it," Trump told CNBC.
Trump has more than 87 million followers on X and over 7 million followers on his own platform, Truth Social, where he posts almost daily.
Biden's campaign joined TikTok during the NFL's Super Bowl Sunday in February.
Both campaigns acknowledge TikTok's wide reach with young users.
A November study by the Pew Research Center found that people in the U.S. aged 18 to 29 are most likely to say they regularly get news on TikTok. About a third of U.S. citizens in that age group said they regularly get news there, a higher share than in years before.
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