Whereas it was President Joe Biden who signed the legislation that might drive 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 USA. The present deadline for a deal is September seventeenth. Nonetheless, it hasn’t stopped Trump’s administration from creating @WhiteHouse on TikTok, which published its first post on Tuesday night: a video celebrating Trump’s accomplishments.
Whereas Trump tried to ban TikTok in 2020, his stance softened throughout his re-election marketing campaign once his team learned how many 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, according to 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 remodeled 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 seek out utility in sustaining an account on the platform. “Why would I wish to do away with TikTok?” Trump stated on Reality 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.”