Whereas it was President Joe Biden who signed the regulation that may pressure ByteDance to promote its stake in TikTok or face a ban, it’s his successor, Donald Trump, who has but to meet his promise of arranging a deal to maintain TikTok working, legally, in the US. 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 publish 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 staff realized what number of supporters Trump had on the platform. In 2024, the Trump marketing campaign launched its personal official account, @TeamTrump, and shortly 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 keeping with journalist Kyle Tharp. A Republican digital operative near the marketing campaign closely credited Trump, a former actuality TV star, for his skill to generate attention-grabbing moments that could possibly be reworked into viral content material. “TikTok is primarily an leisure app,” he beforehand informed 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 critical 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 mentioned on Fact Social in January, sharing a publish 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 mentioned in a press release to The Verge, “and we’re excited to construct upon these successes and talk in a manner no different administration has earlier than.”