Donald Trump joins TikTok
Former US President Donald Trump has joined TikTok and gained more than three million followers despite attempting to ban the app during his time in office.
Donald Trump has joined TikTok and gained more than three million followers despite attempting to ban the app during his time in office.
The former US President unveiled a profile on the video-sharing platform over the weekend (01-02.06.24) and his first post showed him attending an Ultimate Fighting Championship match in Newark, New Jersey on Saturday (01.06.24). It gained more than 56 million views and brought him more than three million followers in just two days.
Trump declared he would "use every tool available to speak directly with the American people" ahead of the November 5 election while his spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement: "We will leave no front undefended and this represents the continued outreach to a younger audience consuming pro-Trump and anti-Biden content.
"There’s no place better than a UFC event to launch president Trump’s TikTok, where he received a hero’s welcome and thousands of fans cheered him on."
Incumbent US President Joe Biden - who will face Trump at the polls later in the year - joined the platform in February and gained more than 340,000 followers.
Trump previously attempted to have the Chinese-owned app blocked from the US during his time in the White House over claims it was a threat to national security, but his move was overturned by the courts.
TikTok is still facing an uncertain future in the US because Biden signed a law in April which will force Chinese tech company ByteDance to sell the app or have it banned from US app stores.
Trump previously admitted he had mixed feelings about TikTok, admitting he doesn't hate it as much as Facebook.
Earlier this year, he told CNBC: "There’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok. But the thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people along with a lot of the media."
