Former President Trump has joined TikTok, the popular social media app he once tried to ban, as he tries to win over disaffected young voters to President Biden.
Biden, whose campaign also has a TikTok account, has struggled to maintain his edge with young 2020 voters as he and Trump prepare to face off once again in the November election.
“This is a vital space for political conversations, especially among specific audiences,” said Valerie Wirtschafter, a fellow at the Brookings Institution in the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative.
“Especially for Trump, if he feels that these voters are disillusioned with Biden for whatever reason, even though they have historically voted Democrat, it’s a prime opportunity to try to turn them out,” she added.
Trump posted his first TikTok on Saturday night during an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) title fight – a move the former president’s campaign said was aimed at reaching younger voters.
“We will leave no front undefended and this represents continued outreach to a younger audience that consumes pro-Trump and anti-Biden content,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement to The Hill.
“There is no better place than a UFC event to launch President Trump’s Tik Tok, where he received a hero’s welcome and thousands of fans cheered him on,” Cheung added.
Trump’s first video got 5.2 million likes and 79.4 million views, while his account gained 5 million followers, easily surpassing Biden’s campaign.
The Biden-Harris HQ account, created in February, has around 355,000 followers. His first post during the Super Bowl received just over 885,000 likes and 10.7 million views.
Notably, on TikTok, Biden does not have a personal account, only a campaign account, which Wirtschafter suggested could be contributing to his more limited reach.
Biden has struggled to maintain his once-wide lead over Trump among young voters.
A Harvard youth survey conducted in April found that the incumbent president led the former president by just 8 percentage points among 18- to 29-year-olds. At the same point in the 2020 race, Biden led Trump by 23 points with the same group.
TikTok has quickly become a major news source for young Americans. About a third of U.S. adults under 30 regularly received news through the app last year, up from 9% in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center.
However, despite the opportunities presented by the platform, it may not be the most forgiving environment for Biden.
More than a fifth of left-leaning creators posted anti-Biden content amid widespread frustration with his administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, according to a CredoIQ analysis obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
An internal TikTok analysis also found that pro-Trump content outnumbered pro-Biden content by a ratio of nearly 2 to 1, The New York Times reported last month.
While Trump may be outpacing Biden on several measures on TikTok, Wirtschafter noted that the former president “has always had a kind of viral potential on social media platforms.”
On social platform X, Trump still has 87.2 million followers, despite posting just once in the last three and a half years. Biden, who usually posts several times a day, has 38 million followers.
Similarly, on Facebook, the former president has 34 million followers, while the incumbent president has 11 million.
“I think it’s a really strong point of the campaign in general, but also of Donald Trump as a person and a candidate,” Wirtschafter told The Hill. “So I’m not surprised that there’s a lot more engagement.”
The youth of this audience on TikTok could represent an opportunity, as well as a risk, for Trump, Wirtschafter added.
“The audience using TikTok, who may be of voting age, probably wasn’t paying as much attention to Trumpian rhetoric from previous campaigns,” she said. “Maybe this is some people’s first elections, maybe this is a kind of starting point for politics.”
“Clearly there is enormous value in these viral numbers. I think the fact that it was so high should certainly be something that the Biden campaign is considering,” Wirtschafter added. “But I think Biden was successful in 2020 in letting Trump speak.”
“This is a new audience and a new group of people who maybe haven’t heard him talk as much,” she continued, adding, “I think there’s potential for, in some sense, it to backfire, because it’s a new audience that You may or may not like what he has to say.”
However, Shoshana Weissmann, digital director and policy researcher at the R Street Institute, warned that sometimes people can overestimate the effectiveness of new social media.
“Snapchat, years ago, had promised that if you go on Snapchat, you would get all these young voters, but no one was on Snapchat to learn about politics,” Weissmann said, pointing to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s decision to join Snapchat. platform in the midst of his 2016 presidential campaign.
“TikTok is different and I think it has greater value there, but I still think people sometimes overestimate the effectiveness of new social media,” she added.
Both Biden and Trump also face multiple accusations of hypocrisy related to TikTok, Weissmann noted.
Biden, for his part, signed legislation in late April requiring ByteDance, TikTok’s China-based parent company, to sell the app within roughly a year or face a ban on U.S. app stores and networks. The bill passed Congress amid growing bipartisan concerns about national security.
However, the Biden campaign chose to remain on TikTok, emphasizing that the platform “is one of the many places where we ensure our content is seen by voters.”
“When the stakes are so high in elections, we will use every tool we have to reach young voters where they are,” a campaign official said at the time.
Trump also attempted to ban the app through an executive order while in office, but the order was blocked in court.
However, as Congress considered the divestment or ban bill earlier this year, the former president reversed course, speaking out against a potential TikTok ban and claiming it would benefit Facebook.
Notably, the move came after Trump met with Jeff Yass, a major Republican donor and investor in TikTok, although the former president said they did not discuss the app.
“Trump wanted to ban TikTok and now he’s all in on it,” Weissmann told The Hill. “And I think that applies to both politics and maybe donors as well.”
“So with President Biden signing the ban and it still being on TikTok, it’s just ridiculous,” she continued. “Because if anyone should be worried about the effects of TikTok on cybersecurity, it should probably be the people closest to the President of the United States.”
“I don’t think their game is really worth it to them,” she added. “In the process, they will just make themselves look really hypocritical.”
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
