Trump Joins TikTok, Gaining Over 3 Million Followers

Former US President Donald Trump visits a Sanaa convenient store in a Harlem neighborhood in New York City, on April 16, 2024. Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images

Former President Donald Trump gained over 3 million followers within a day of joining TikTok, surpassing the follower count of President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign on the Chinese-owned video-sharing app.

The presumptive GOP presidential nominee posted his first TikTok video on Saturday, showing him greeting fans at the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event he attended in Newark, New Jersey.

“The president is now on TikTok,” UFC CEO Dana White said in the video posted on the verified account @realdonaldtrump.

“It’s my honor,” President Trump replied, as a Kid Rock song played in the background. At the end of the video, the former president said: “That was a good walk-on, right?”

That post gained more than 3.2 million likes, 59.5 million views, and over 423,000 shares at the time of writing. Days before joining the app, President Trump was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records.

His decision to join TikTok comes as the app faces a potential ban in the United States. President Joe Biden signed a bill in April that would require ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to sell the app within a year or it will be banned from U.S. app stores.

According to the law, President Biden can extend the deadline by three months to allow the deal to be completed. In response, ByteDance has vowed to exercise its legal rights to prevent a ban on TikTok.

President Biden Also Joined TikTok

President Biden’s reelection campaign joined TikTok in February, even as the app is banned on government devices due to national security concerns. The campaign’s verified TikTok account @bidenhq has over 343k followers to date.

President Trump also attempted to ban TikTok through an executive order during his presidency in 2020, citing security risks due to the company’s connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but his efforts were later blocked by federal courts.

Security experts have long warned that TikTok is a weaponized application that could be used to promote CCP propaganda or feed Americans’ data directly to the regime.

Beijing-based tech firm ByteDance introduced its short-video platform Douyin in 2016 and its international version, TikTok, a year later. More than 150 million Americans are now using the app, according to its website. Under China’s Counterespionage Law, ByteDance will need to hand over data on American users if requested.

TikTok has repeatedly maintained that it is independent from its Chinese parent company.

According to TikTok, its U.S. customer data is stored in Virginia and backed up in Singapore, and it has never shared, and will never share, its U.S. data with the Chinese regime.

Terri Wu and Andrew Thornebrooke contributed to this report.