WASHINGTON: If President Joe Biden follows through on his promise to sign a ban on TikTok because of its ties to the Chinese government, the 81-year-old could rob his re-election But the comments focused on a different issue entirely: the proposed ban.
“Good thing we saw this on TikTok,” said one. “How are you going to use it to campaign if you ban it?” asked another.
House Republicans voted Wednesday to force Chinese TikTok owner ByteDance to divest its US business of 170 million users or face a ban. If the Senate passes the bill, as the White House is urging, Biden has pledged to sign it.
But the 2024 campaign is looming, and Democratic-leaning US political discourse online has shifted to TikTok in recent years, political strategists say. They note that X, formerly Twitter, has tightened restrictions on harassment under owner Elon Musk, while Facebook has backed away from political content,
TikTok users are disproportionately among groups that reliably vote for the Democrats that Biden needs to woo. The Trump campaign does not have an official TikTok account.
According to a 2023 Pew Research Center study, roughly 60% of regular users of TikTok in the US are Democrats or lean Democratic. Nineteen percent of TikTok’s message consumers are black and 30% Hispanic, compared to about 14% and 19% of the general US population. About 44% of TikTok’s message consumers are between the ages of 18 and 29.
“We voted for Joe Biden through social media, through the power of TikTok,” said NaomiHearts, a Chicana trans woman who has 1.1 million followers on TikTok, noting that youth voter turnout hit a record in 2020. “Why TikTok? “
“This is a critical national security issue,” House Republican No. 2 Steve Scalise said on the X social media platform.
TikTok denies sharing any user data with China, arguing that a ban would deprive Americans of their constitutional right to free speech.
The @BidenHQ campaign account had 237,500 followers as of March 13, while @thedemocrats had over half a million.
The White House briefed more than 70 influencers and content creators on TikTok and other social media platforms with a combined audience of more than 100 million followers on topics such as student debt and economic issues ahead of the president’s State of the Union address to amplify his message.
“We don’t care about the impact” of the ban on Biden’s re-election chances, a top White House official said. “There’s a lot of twists and turns before anything happens here,” because Trump opposes the bill and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has not committed to introducing it.
Federal employees are banned from having TikTok on their phones, so Biden administration employees can’t have the app on their work phones.
Biden campaign workers are not employed by the government and do not deal with national security issues, so they may have TikTok on their phones, one source briefed on the matter said.
But most campaign staffers who are in frequent contact with the White House have two phones. Only one will engage with TikTok to isolate the use of the app from other work streams and communications, including emails, the source said.
The White House has previously raised concerns about TikTok’s data retention and the potential misuse of that data and privacy information by foreign actors. “We are taking the necessary security measures to ensure that no data falls into the wrong hands,” the source said.
The campaign is trying to reach people “where they are,” the source added. “We’ll see what happens in the Senate, and we’re a long way from any decision on this. It’s a wait-and-see mode for everybody.”
