Biden Campaign Joins TikTok Despite White House Ban

The Biden campaign has truly thrown all caution to the wind in trying to attract more voters ahead of November’s presidential election.

On Sunday, the campaign unveiled its new social media account on TikTok. Ironically, it did so with a post on the social media platform X.

The move to open a TikTok account comes after the president signed legislation that banned TikTok from all mobile devices issued by the federal government. Several states enacted similar bans last year.

All of those entities banned the app over concerns that the app’s parent company, ByteDance, could allow communist China to access the data of American users.

As a China-based company, ByteDance could at any time be forced to turn over all information it has to the communist government there. Making matters worse, former employees at TikTok were caught on tape saying that employees of the company who were based in China regularly accessed the private data of American users.

The Associated Press has reported that both the Federal Communications Commission and the FBI have said ByteDance had the ability to share users’ “browser history, locations and biometric identifiers” with the Chinese government.

Even though the company tried to alleviate these concerns by launching “Project Texas,” where all data for American users was supposed to be stored on Oracle serves in the U.S., TikTok continued to share that data with high-ranking Chinese officials, according to multiple reports.

“[TikTok’s] parent company is effectively beholden to the Chinese government and that is what in turn creates a series of national security concerns in the [Chinese] government’s ability to leverage that access or that authority,” FBI Director Christopher Wray testified in front of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party in January. “I think it is a threat that is very significant.”

Despite all of these concerns, some of which have come from top Biden administration officials, the Biden-Harris campaign is pressing forward with its new account on TikTok full steam ahead.

Questioned about why it would join TikTok, the campaign only said it was “part of an effort to meet voters where they are.”

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR