Biden knows he needs Gen Z. Can he find them on TikTok?
President Joe Biden’s campaign has joined TikTok in a bid to reach young voters where they are—despite the app being banned on U.S. government devices. @BidenHQ posted its first TikTok video on Super Bowl Sunday, a light-hearted Q&A of Biden answering this-or-that questions, which currently has 7.6 million views. The account has since uploaded other posts, like a compilation video of former President Donald Trump saying he got rid of Roe v. Wade (in one, saying “killing” it), and Biden making a joke about his own age. It’s the latest example of Biden’s campaign going multiplatform, and a clear picture of how he’s going to design his campaign to compete against his opposition. Last October, the Biden campaign joined Trump’s Truth Social site, but perhaps unsurprisingly, so far TikTok appears to be more fertile ground for garnering supporters. Since the campaign launched its TikTok account, it has gained more than 92,000 followers. That’s enough to be considered a “micro-influencer.” The decision to join the app, which is owned by the Chinese tech company ByteDance, drew criticism from Republican Rep. Josh Hawley, who wrote on X, “Why is Biden on TikTok? Easy. Because he’s desperate. What message does it send? He doesn’t give a rip about Americans’ security or China’s spying.” Democratic Senator Mark Warner, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he was “a little worried about a mixed message.” John Kirby, who Biden just named White House national security communications adviser, said at a White House briefing Monday that he’d refer all questions about the campaign’s use of TikTok to the campaign, but that the government’s stance toward the app hadn’t changed. “All I can tell you is it’s banned on U.S. government devices, and we follow that guidance,” Kirby said at the briefing. “I don’t want to get into too much of the national security, technical reasons behind that, but it does have to do with concerns about the preservation of data and the potential misuse of that data and privacy information by foreign actors. I think that’s as far as I can go.” Biden won voters ages 18 to 29 by a margin of 24% in 2020, according to Pew Research Center, but an NBC News poll found his support lagging four years later on TikTok. According to the poll, respondents ages 18 to 34 who use TikTok at least once a day narrowly back Trump over Biden 44% to 42%. Biden skipped the traditional pregame network interview this year, and his campaign didn’t advertise during the game. Instead, his TikTok account and social media posts constituted the entirety of his campaign’s Super Bowl content strategy. It was a bid to control the message, sure. But it’s also quite a bit cheaper.
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President Joe Biden’s campaign has joined TikTok in a bid to reach young voters where they are—despite the app being banned on U.S. government devices.
@BidenHQ posted its first TikTok video on Super Bowl Sunday, a light-hearted Q&A of Biden answering this-or-that questions, which currently has 7.6 million views. The account has since uploaded other posts, like a compilation video of former President Donald Trump saying he got rid of Roe v. Wade (in one, saying “killing” it), and Biden making a joke about his own age.
It’s the latest example of Biden’s campaign going multiplatform, and a clear picture of how he’s going to design his campaign to compete against his opposition. Last October, the Biden campaign joined Trump’s Truth Social site, but perhaps unsurprisingly, so far TikTok appears to be more fertile ground for garnering supporters. Since the campaign launched its TikTok account, it has gained more than 92,000 followers. That’s enough to be considered a “micro-influencer.”
The decision to join the app, which is owned by the Chinese tech company ByteDance, drew criticism from Republican Rep. Josh Hawley, who wrote on X, “Why is Biden on TikTok? Easy. Because he’s desperate. What message does it send? He doesn’t give a rip about Americans’ security or China’s spying.”
Democratic Senator Mark Warner, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he was “a little worried about a mixed message.” John Kirby, who Biden just named White House national security communications adviser, said at a White House briefing Monday that he’d refer all questions about the campaign’s use of TikTok to the campaign, but that the government’s stance toward the app hadn’t changed.
“All I can tell you is it’s banned on U.S. government devices, and we follow that guidance,” Kirby said at the briefing. “I don’t want to get into too much of the national security, technical reasons behind that, but it does have to do with concerns about the preservation of data and the potential misuse of that data and privacy information by foreign actors. I think that’s as far as I can go.”
Biden won voters ages 18 to 29 by a margin of 24% in 2020, according to Pew Research Center, but an NBC News poll found his support lagging four years later on TikTok. According to the poll, respondents ages 18 to 34 who use TikTok at least once a day narrowly back Trump over Biden 44% to 42%.
Biden skipped the traditional pregame network interview this year, and his campaign didn’t advertise during the game. Instead, his TikTok account and social media posts constituted the entirety of his campaign’s Super Bowl content strategy. It was a bid to control the message, sure. But it’s also quite a bit cheaper.
