Former President Donald Trump, who once sought to force TikTok’s Chinese owners to sell the platform, is booming on the social media app and overshadowing President Biden.
Since last November, TikTok has seen twice as much pro-Trump content as pro-Biden content, two TikTok officials told Puck, a digital news organization. There have been 1.29 million videos or images that are pro-Trump, totaling 9.1 billion views, compared with 651,000 positive posts for Mr. Biden, with 6.15 billion views.
Puck found that from January 2023 into this month, videos with the hashtag #Trump2024 have received 472.8 million likes with 6.5 billion views, significantly more than the 50.9 million likes and 558 million views for videos with the hashtag #Biden2024.
Mr. Trump doesn’t even have an official account on the app; all the videos garnering engagement come from other users. Mr. Biden does have an official TikTok account for his reelection campaign, with a post as recent as May 11.
One-third of U.S. adults use TikTok, according to a Pew Research Center study in February. It is particularly popular with younger adults ages 18-34 — a voting bloc that Mr. Biden is struggling to reach.
Mr. Trump has flip-flopped on his view of the app. He said in March that he opposed a ban on the social media app, but months before the 2020 election he had his own executive order trying to get Chinese owner ByteDance to sell. A federal judge at the time blocked the former president’s attempt, calling it “arbitrary and capricious.”
Mr. Biden signed a bill last month that bans the app in the U.S. unless the Chinese-owned platform sells to an American company within nine months.
The bill was part of a large package that included billions in aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. The package moved from the House to the Senate to the president’s desk in a matter of days.
Discussions over banning TikTok had been circling in Congress for months over its threat to the country’s national security. Lawmakers argued that ByteDance is in cahoots with the Chinese communist government, and could steal the personal information of the Americans using the app. TikTok is already banned on government agency devices under a previous law.
ByteDance has argued that it does not share information with the Chinese government, and the ban violates Americans’ First Amendment rights to free speech, and that the company has no plans to sell. Last week, the company filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government, calling the ban unconstitutional.
“For the first time in history, Congress has enacted a law that subjects a single, named speech platform to a permanent, nationwide ban, and bars every American from participating in a unique online community with more than 1 billion people worldwide,” the company said in a 70-page complaint that was filed in the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C.
In the lawsuit, the company argued that letting Congress ban the platform over national security concerns sets a dangerous precedent that could lead to the government shutting down newspapers or websites it didn’t like.
• Mallory Wilson can be reached at mwilson@washingtontimes.com.
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