Joe Biden’s Popping Up on TikTok Even Though It’s Banned in the White House
Two weeks out from the Nov. 8 midterms, President Joe Biden sat for an interview -- not with a broadcast news anchor or major newspaper, but a panel of six young activists organized by NowThis News.
As the conversation aired on the network's YouTube channel that night, the count of live viewers hovered at about 6,000.
But the live coverage wasn't the point.
The interview was intended as a back door for the White House into one of the fastest-growing social media platforms for politics and news, one the White House can't access directly itself: TikTok Inc.
The rapidly expanding video-sharing platform has become increasingly pivotal to reaching young voters, particularly as legacy social media networks like Facebook and Twitter publicly falter. But TikTok's aggressive harvesting of user data -- and suspicions of its Chinese parent company ByteDance Ltd. -- have fueled bipartisan alarm about the amount of information on US users that may be funneled to Beijing.
By having the president appear on NowThis, the White House could be certain that clips from the event would be posted to the channel's millions of TikTok followers, amplifying the appearance many times over without putting the president directly on the social media platform.
The engagement betrays a simple calculation within the West Wing: TikTok is too important to ignore.
One in 10 Americans and more than a quarter of adults between the ages of 18 and 29 say they “regularly get news from TikTok” according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center.
More importantly, TikTok and Instagram -- which has adopted some of TikTok's most popular features -- are the only two major social networks with increasing levels of news consumption. Users of Twitter
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