Former President Trump has joined TikTok, a popular social media app he once tried to ban, in an attempt to garner support from young voters disaffected by President Biden.
Biden, who also has a campaign account on TikTok, has struggled to maintain his lead among younger voters from 2020 as he prepares to face off again against Trump in November’s election.
“This is an important space for political dialogue, especially among certain audiences,” said Valerie Wildshafter, a research fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies Initiative.
“This is a great opportunity for Trump in particular to alienate voters who, if he feels, have historically voted Democratic but are now disillusioned with Biden for some reason,” she added.
Trump posted his first TikTok on Saturday night during his Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) title fight, a move the former president’s campaign said was aimed at appealing to younger voters.
“We intend to defend any battle lines, and this represents a continued outreach to younger audiences who consume pro-Trump and anti-Biden content,” Trump campaign spokesman Stephen Chang said in a statement to The Hill.
“What better place to launch President Trump’s Tik Tok than a UFC event, where he was given a hero’s welcome and thousands of fans cheered him on,” Chan added.
Trump’s first video garnered 5.2 million likes and 79.4 million views, and his account gained 5 million followers, easily surpassing the Biden campaign.
The Biden-Harris HQ account, which launched in February, has about 355,000 followers, and its first post during the Super Bowl garnered more than 885,000 likes and 10.7 million views.
Notably, Biden does not have a personal TikTok account, only a campaign account, which Wirtshafter suggested may be one reason why TikTok’s reach is limited.
Biden once held a large lead over Trump but has struggled to maintain it among younger voters.
A Harvard University poll of young people conducted in April found that the incumbent president had a slight eight-point lead over the former president among 18- to 29-year-olds. At the same point in the 2020 election, Biden had a 23-point lead over Trump among that same age group.
TikTok has quickly become a key news source for younger Americans: About a third of American adults under 30 regularly got their news from the app last year, up from 9% in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center.
But despite the opportunities the platform offers, it may not be the most accommodating environment for Biden.
Amid widespread dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, more than a fifth of left-leaning creators are posting anti-Biden content, according to a CredoIQ analysis obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
TikTok’s internal analysis also found that pro-Trump content outnumbered pro-Biden content by a nearly two-to-one ratio, The New York Times reported last month.
While Trump may be outperforming Biden on some metrics on TikTok, Wirtshafter noted that the former president “always had a certain viral potential on the social media platform.”
Despite posting just once in the past three and a half years on social platform X, Trump still boasts 87.2 million followers, while Biden, who often posts multiple times a day, has 38 million followers.
Similarly, on Facebook, the former president has 34 million followers, while the current president has 11 million.
“I think that’s a strength of the campaign as a whole, but also of Donald Trump as an individual and as a candidate,” Wiltshafter told The Hill, “so it’s no surprise that we’ve seen a massive increase in participation.”
TikTok’s young audience could pose an opportunity as well as a risk for Trump, he added.
“TikTok’s audience is likely of voting age, but they may not have paid much attention to the Trumpian rhetoric of previous campaigns,” she said. “For some, this may be their first election, and this may be kind of a political jumping-off point.”
“Obviously, those viral numbers have a lot of value, and the fact that they were so high is something I think the Biden campaign should definitely take note of,” Wirtshafter added, “But I think what Biden did successfully in 2020 was let Trump do the talking.”
“This is a new audience, a new group of people who may not have heard much of him,” she continued, adding, “I think in some ways it could backfire because it’s a new audience that may or may not like what he has to say.”
But Shoshana Weissman, digital director and policy fellow at the R Street Institute, warned that people can sometimes overestimate the effectiveness of new social media platforms.
“Snapchat promised years ago that they would get all of the young voters to join, but no one was using Snapchat to learn about politics,” Weissman said, noting that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton decided to join Snapchat during the 2016 presidential campaign.
“I think TikTok is different and more valuable, but I still think people sometimes overestimate the effectiveness of new social media platforms,” she added.
Weissman noted that both Biden and Trump have faced various accusations of hypocrisy related to TikTok.
Meanwhile, Biden signed a bill in late April that gives TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, about a year to sell the app or face being banned from U.S. app stores and networks. The bill safely passed Congress amid growing bipartisan concerns about national security.
But the Biden campaign has chosen to remain on TikTok, stressing that the platform is “one of many places we’re making sure our content is seen by voters.”
“At a time when the stakes are so high, we will use every tool we have to reach young voters wherever they are,” a campaign official said at the time.
President Trump similarly tried to ban the app through an executive order while in office, but the order was blocked by the courts.
But when Congress was considering a divestment or ban bill earlier this year, the former president reversed course and spoke out against a possible TikTok ban, arguing it would benefit Facebook.
Notably, the change came after Trump met with Jeff Yass, a major Republican donor and TikTok investor, though the former president said they did not discuss the app.
“Trump wanted to ban TikTok and now he’s all for it,” Weissman told The Hill. “I think it’s about politics and maybe donors.”
“It’s ridiculous that people are still using TikTok even though President Biden signed the ban,” she continued, “because if anyone is concerned about the cybersecurity implications of TikTok, it’s probably the people closest to the president of the United States.”
“I don’t think their play is really worth it to them,” she added, “and in the process, they just make themselves look really hypocritical.”
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