“Well, I heard this recently, I was on the For You page, so I thought I’d chime in here too,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in the first post from her new personal account on TikTok, the Chinese-owned short video platform on which she has joined. became a seemingly nocturnal sensation since launching his campaign for president earlier this week.
Six hours after joining TikTok on Thursday, Harris had already amassed more than a million followers.
President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in February created a campaign TikTok account, @bidenhq, which was renamed earlier this week to @KamalaHQ and since then has more than quadrupled in followers to over 1.6 million.
“Our job as a campaign is to cut through the noise and make sure we’re talking to voters wherever they are — TikTok is one of those landscapes, and we’re leaving no stone unturned,” said deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty. People in a statement on Thursday. “Placing the vice president on TikTok means she will be able to directly engage with an important constituency in a way that is true and authentic to the platform and the audience.”
Harris’ nascent presidential campaign and her supporters have leaned on the new presumptive Democratic nominee’s virality on social media, embracing the “brat” and “coconut tree” memes in an apparent attempt to engage with younger voters who already seem to be paying dividends.
According to a new Axios/Generation Laboratory survey, among young people aged 18 to 34, Harris has more than triple the advantage over Trump (+20%) compared to Biden (+6%).
Harris joins TikTok – which Trump joined in June – as the platform comes under increasing bipartisan scrutiny in the US, largely due to security concerns about its parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance.
Harris said ABC news in a March interview that the Biden-Harris administration does not plan to ban TikTok, which she said has “very important” benefits, including as a platform for people to make money and share information. “We need to negotiate with the owner and we have national security concerns regarding the owner of TikTok, but we have no intention of banning TikTok,” she said.
However, Biden in April signed into law a bill requiring ByteDance to divest its stake in TikTok, which the company has said it will not do, within a year or face a ban in the US.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
