Biden signed legislation to potentially ban TikTok in the US. His campaign still plans to stay on the app
Kyiv • UNN
Biden signed legislation that could ban TikTok in the U.S. while his campaign used the platform and worked with influencers, drawing criticism for hypocrisy from young voters who rely on TikTok for news.
US President Joe Biden signed a law that could ban TikTok in the United States, while his campaign used the platform and tried to work with influencers, writes UNN with reference to AP.
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The US president, already struggling to maintain previous support from younger voters, is now facing criticism from some avid users of the app, which researchers found is the main source of news for a third of Americans under 30.
"The Biden administration supporting a ban on TikTok while at the same time using TikTok for campaign purposes is blatant hypocrisy," said Kalil Green, who has more than 650,000 subscribers and is known on TikTok as the "Generation Z Historian.
"I think it shows that he and his people know the power and necessity of TikTok," he pointed out.
Biden's campaign defends his approach and rejects the idea that White House policies are at odds with his political efforts.
"It would be foolish to write off any place where people get information about the president," said Rob Flaherty, who ran the White House Office of Digital Strategy and is now deputy campaign manager for Biden's re-election campaign.
Flaherty said Biden's team developed a relationship with TikTok Influencers during the 2020 election and that the platform has only become more influential since then, "growing as an internet search engine and driving the narrative about the president.
Biden's campaign argues that the increasingly fragmented modern media environment requires her to meet voters where they are, and that TikTok is one of many such places where potential supporters see his content, in addition to platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
Biden's campaign has created its own content on TikTok, but has also relied on regular users who interact with the president. That includes a post of a family eating fries and other snacks from fast-food chain Cook Out when Biden recently visited Raleigh, North Carolina, as well as a video of Coleman.
Opponents of TikTok say its ownership by Chinese company ByteDance gives Beijing dangerous influence over what Americans see, as well as potential access to U.S. user data. Chinese national security laws give the ruling Communist Party wide latitude over private business, though the U.S. has not made public evidence that the Chinese government manipulated the app or forced ByteDance to do its bidding.
The law, signed by Biden on Wednesday, requires ByteDance to sell the app to a U.S. company within a year or it will face a national ban. ByteDance said the law violates the First Amendment and vowed to sue.
Former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican Party nominee, is now publicly opposing a ban on TikTok after, while in office, issuing an executive order attempting to ban the app unless ByteDance sells it.
The White House does not have an official TikTok account, and Biden banned the app from most government devices in December 2022. However, Biden's campaign staff officially joined TikTok the night before this year's Super Bowl.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the law signed by Biden "is not a ban. This is about our national security." She added that the White House is not saying "that we don't want Americans to use TikTok.
TikTok has 170 million users in the U.S., and a study released last November by the Pew Research Center found that about a third of U.S. adults under the age of 30 regularly get news from TikTok, compared to 14% of all adults.
According to an AP-NORC poll conducted in January, adults under the age of 30 are more likely than U.S. adults overall to oppose a ban on TikTok use in the United States. Nearly half of young adults ages 18 to 29 oppose, compared to 35 percent of U.S. adults.
About 2 in 10 U.S. adults say they use TikTok at least once a day, including 44% among 18- to 29-year-olds. Among young adults ages 18 to 29, 7% say they use TikTok "almost all the time" and another 28% use it "several times a day.
Priorities USA, the Democratic Party's top supercommittee, is spending nearly $1 million this cycle to help more than 100 TikTok Influencers produce content in support of Biden ahead of the November election, and sees the effort as an extension of traditional organizing and communications initiatives.
Even if TikTok is eventually banned, most of its influencers are on other platforms that can continue to use their content, especially YouTube and Instagram, said Danielle Butterfield, executive director of Priorities USA.
Meanwhile, Biden's standing among young people is deteriorating. About one-third of adults under 30 approve of the way he's handling his job as president, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in March. That's a sharp drop from about two-thirds approval when he first took office.
Flaherty, Biden's deputy campaign manager, said the campaign has paid influencers in certain instances, such as when their content was used in ads, and that some content creators who work with the campaign have expressed concern about legislation forcing divestitures. But he doesn't think it will have a major impact on Election Day.
"I think young voters are not going to vote on TikTok," Flaherty said. - They're going to vote on issues that are being discussed in TikTok, but are being discussed elsewhere.
Green, however, said young voters' frustration with the Biden administration in other areas - especially in the way it handles the war between Israel and Hamas - combined with legislation to sell TikTok has created political problems for Biden.
"I can't overemphasize how this exacerbates the protests," he said, "and the discontent that people already have.
