Biden Campaign Joins TikTok Despite Concerns Over Security Risk

The logo of video-focused social networking service TikTok, at the TikTok UK office, in London, on Feb. 9, 2020. Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images

President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign has created an official account on TikTok to try to connect with younger voters, even as the president has banned the video-sharing app from most government devices.

At the moment, the social media account boasts a profile photo displaying the so-called Dark Brandon meme.

It has only posted two videos, including one of President Biden talking about the Super Bowl and one condemning President Trump’s appointment of Supreme Court judges who overturned Roe v. Wade.

The president signed a law banning the app on most government devices because of the national security risks posed by its parent company, ByteDance, a Chinese corporation with deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Critics say that TikTok operates as a tool in the CCP’s “cognitive warfare” campaign against the United States. TikTok executives have admitted that they promoted and censored content at the command of the regime in the past but claim that is no longer their practice.

Some evidence suggests that TikTok is still heavily censoring content critical of the CCP, however.

The House Select Committee on the CCP shared slides during a hearing in December 2023 outlining discrepancies between how such topics were shared on TikTok versus other platforms. “Viral topics” in politics and pop culture were proportionately represented on TikTok and Instagram in relation to the number of monthly users that both apps had.

Thus, there were about twice as many posts about Democrats, former President Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, and the “Barbie” movie on Instagram because Instagram has about twice as many monthly users as TikTok.

However, that proportionality changes when one looks at topics heavily criticized or censored by the CCP.

There were about nine times fewer posts about the Uyghurs on TikTok than on Instagram, for example. And there were 30 times fewer posts about Tibet.

There were 153 times fewer posts on TikTok about the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests and massacre, a topic heavily censored by Beijing on the mainland.

Similarly, TikTok was discovered last year to have contained code for conducting keylogging, meaning that the app can record all of a user’s keystrokes on the device he or she is using, including in email and on websites while using the in-app browser.

That problem is made graver because of a 2017 law in China that allows the CCP to access all data stored within the country. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified to Congress last year that the company was still storing Americans’ data overseas.

It’s currently unclear whether the president will play any part in directing the content of his reelection campaign’s TikTok presence.

White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby declined to comment on the matter, saying that it’s a campaign matter. He noted that there has been no change in White House policy.

Emel Akan contributed to this report.