Whereas it was President Joe Biden who signed the legislation that may pressure ByteDance to promote its stake in TikTok or face a ban, it’s his successor, Donald Trump, who has but to satisfy his promise of arranging a deal to maintain TikTok operating, legally, in america. The present deadline for a deal is September seventeenth. Nonetheless, it hasn’t stopped Trump’s administration from creating @WhiteHouse on TikTok, which revealed its first put up on Tuesday evening: a video celebrating Trump’s accomplishments.
Whereas Trump tried to ban TikTok in 2020, his stance softened throughout his re-election marketing campaign as soon as his group realized what number of supporters Trump had on the platform. In 2024, the Trump marketing campaign launched its personal official account, @TeamTrump, and rapidly dominated the platform, getting extra followers and views on their content material than former Vice President Kamala Harris’s now-dormant marketing campaign account — 2.8 billion to 2.2 billion, in accordance with journalist Kyle Tharp. A Republican digital operative near the marketing campaign closely credited Trump, a former actuality TV star, for his capability to generate attention-grabbing moments that may very well be reworked into viral content material. “TikTok is primarily an leisure app,” he beforehand instructed The Verge, “and our utilization of it was simply considerably extra savvy than [the Democrats].”
Though the legality of and ulterior motives behind a TikTok ban stay a severe query, the Trump administration, for now, seems to search out utility in sustaining an account on the platform. “Why would I need to do away with TikTok?” Trump stated on Fact Social in January, sharing a put up concerning the billions of views his marketing campaign account continued to rack up. White Home press secretary Karoline Leavitt repeated this stance after the federal government account was launched. “President Trump’s message dominated TikTok throughout his presidential marketing campaign,” she stated in an announcement to The Verge, “and we’re excited to construct upon these successes and talk in a method no different administration has earlier than.”
