Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has joined TikTok, first posting over the weekend on the popular video-sharing app which he tried to ban due to national security concerns when he was president.
Trump's first video on the platform features clips from his attendance at an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) match in Newark, New Jersey, on Saturday.
“We will leave no front undefended and this represents the continued outreach to a younger audience consuming pro-Trump and anti-Biden content,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung told media outlets in a statement about the campaign’s decision to join TikTok.
“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.”
In his first day on the platform, Trump gained about three million followers.
Democratic incumbent Joe Biden has roughly 340,000 followers on the platform.
Trump attempted to ban TikTok in 2020 when he was president, a move that was blocked by the courts. He has since criticized attempts to limit the app, saying this would strengthen Facebook and Instagram parent Meta Platforms.
In May, he called Facebook the "enemy of the people".
In April 2024, the US government ordered TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance to divest the app by next January or face a ban on concerns US user data could be shared with the Chinese government, claims the company has always denied. ByteDance is challenging the legislation in court.