Joe Biden’s re-election campaign won’t stop using TikTok, despite US divestment-or-ban bill
- US President Joe Biden signed a bill on Wednesday that could ban TikTok from US app stores
- His campaign plans to stay on the app anyway to reach crucial younger voters for November election
Joe Biden’s re-election campaign plans to continue using TikTok, a campaign official said, shortly after the US president signed into law a bill that would ban the app if its Chinese owner fails to divest it.
“A fragmented media environment requires us to show up and meet voters where they are - and that includes online. TikTok is one of many places we’re making sure our content is being seen by voters,” said a Biden campaign official, who declined to be named.
The campaign will use “enhanced security measures” while using the app, the official said. Biden’s campaign staff are not employed by the government and do not deal with national security issues, so they are allowed to have the app on their phones, campaign officials had previously said.
The Biden campaign account on TikTok, @bidenhq, has posted close to 120 videos and has more than 306,000 followers, and routinely posts videos of Biden there, even as the White House says TikTok causes “legitimate national security concerns”.
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The four-year fight over TikTok is a major front in a battle over the internet and technology between Washington and Beijing.
Opponents of TikTok say its ownership by Chinese company ByteDance gives Beijing a dangerous amount of influence over what narratives Americans see as well as potential access to US user data.
But the US has not made public evidence that the Chinese government has manipulated the app or forced ByteDance to do its bidding.
The new law gives ByteDance nine months to sell the app or face a ban in the US. The president could grant a one-time 90-day extension, but even without it, the earliest a ban could start is January.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the legislation Biden signed “is not a ban. This is about our national security”. She added that the White House isn’t saying “that we do not want Americans to use TikTok”.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who is not on the app, said earlier this week Biden was responsible if a ban were imposed, urging voters to take notice. When he was president in 2020, Trump tried to ban TikTok over national security concerns but was blocked by the courts.
Biden campaign aides do not expect the decision to hurt them with young voters and expect a lengthy legal fight to determine the app’s fate and to delay any potential ban.
“Reducing young people’s vote down to the use of a social media app is unserious, inaccurate and insulting: election after election, young people continue to show us they understand the stakes of this moment,” said Biden campaign spokesman Seth Schuster.
TikTok has 170 million US users and a study released last November by the Pew Research Centre found that about a third of US adults under 30 regularly got news from TikTok, compared to 14 per cent of all adults.
Biden, meanwhile, has seen his standing with young people decline. About one-third of adults under 30 approve of how he’s handling his job as president, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in March - a sharp drop from the roughly two-thirds approved when he first entered office.
“There’s a core hypocrisy to the Biden administration supporting the TikTok ban while at the same time using TikTok for his campaign purposes,” said Kahlil Greene, who has more than 650,000 followers and is known on TikTok as the “Gen Z Historian”.
“I think it illustrates that he and his people know the power and necessity of TikTok.”
Reuters and Associated Press
