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President Joe Biden signed a bill Wednesday that could lead to a ban on TikTok, the popular social media app that U.S. lawmakers have said is susceptible to data manipulation by the Chinese Communist Party — and a platform that Biden's own re-election campaign is using to reach young voters.
The bill gives TikTok's China-based parent company, ByteDance, up to one year to sell the app or be banned from the U.S. Yet despite the looming court fight over ByteDance's divestment and the persistent cries from lawmakers that the app is a "threat" to national security, Biden's campaign indicated it had no plans to quit TikTok during the election.
“A fragmented media environment requires us to show up and meet voters where they are — and that includes online,” a Biden campaign official told NBC News on Wednesday. “TikTok is one of many places we’re making sure our content is being seen by voters.”
The campaign first made its debut on TikTok under @BidenHQ during the Super Bowl. The account posts content designed for a younger audience, using slang like “cooked” and employing memes to mock former President Donald Trump and praise Biden. (Trump and his campaign are not on TikTok, but the former president was against TikTok before he was for it, as my colleague Steve Benen has documented.)
Some Republican lawmakers criticized the account at its launch; Biden banned TikTok from government-issued devices in 2022, and his campaign’s use of the app has seemed out of step with how the White House expects government agencies to approach using it, which is not at all.
The potential TikTok ban has exposed deeply conflicting sentiments about the app between lawmakers and large portions of the public. TikTok’s detractors pointed to issues with the app like its opaque collection of user data (a widespread practice among major tech companies), its exposure of users to harmful content (which is a huge problem across social media platforms), and the CCP's potential use of the app to influence American users (which the U.S. government has also done abroad via other platforms).
Biden's campaign told NBC News that it intends to keep using “enhanced security measures” when using TikTok. But now that the U.S. government has officially started the countdown clock on its sale, the Biden campaign’s continued use of the app is likely to draw renewed accusations of hypocrisy.