After trying to ban the app, Donald Trump launches into TikTok

A turnaround for Donald Trump. The Republican presidential candidate created a TikTok account and published his first video on Saturday, June 1, when he tried to ban this platform when he was in power in the United States.

Joe Biden’s opponent made it brief: a 13-second video, which shows Donald Trump attending an MMA fight in Newark (New Jersey). At his side, the boss of the mixed martial arts organization UFC, Dana White, who announces at the start of the video that “the president is now on TikTok”. “It is an honour for me”replied Donald Trump, found guilty of 34 falsifications of accounting documents in the Stormy Daniels affair on May 31.

The video had accumulated more than 63 million views as of Monday afternoon, and the @realDonaldTrump account had more than 3.7 million subscribers. A faster success than that of Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s team, which has been active on TikTok since February. The bidenhq account is followed by 345,000 subscribers.

In 2020, Donald Trump cited alleged threats to national security to ban the application. The measure was challenged by the application in court, then canceled by the Biden administration.

Since then, Joe Biden has resumed this ban project, again for reasons of national security, but also data protection and the mental health of American users. The Democratic president promulgated a law at the end of April which plans to ban TikTok in the United States if its parent company, the Chinese company Bytedance, does not sell it to a non-Chinese company within 12 months. TikTok and ByteDance filed a complaint against the United States in early May, arguing that the law was “unconstitutional”.