President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign joined TikTok on Sunday, a platform Biden banned on all federal government-owned devices due to national security concerns.
Biden’s team launched its first video, captioned "lol hey guys," on the Chinese-owned video-sharing platform during the Super Bowl on Sunday. The video, which has garnered more than five million views as of Monday afternoon, features the 81-year-old president answering several questions about the championship game.
Asked by his aide whether he would be supporting the Kansas City Chiefs or the San Francisco 49ers, the president responded, "Two great quarterbacks. Hard to decide, but if I didn’t say I was for the Eagles, then I’d be sleeping alone. My wife’s a Philly girl."
Biden also said he would "get in trouble" if he answered his aide’s question about an online conspiracy theory that Taylor Swift's relationship with Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce and the Chiefs' Super Bowl win were orchestrated to get the president reelected in November.
While campaign aides noted the president is not personally managing the account, his campaign’s move to TikTok has raised eyebrows. Critics of the platform in the United States have raised alarm that the Chinese Communist Party could access and exploit American users' data on the popular platform.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) introduced the No TikTok on Government Devices Act in 2020 in response to national security concerns about TikTok. The bill, which passed in Congress and was signed into law by Biden in 2022, prohibits the use of TikTok on all federal government devices.
The Biden campaign’s TikTok launch may be an attempt to appeal to more young Americans amid the president's poor poll numbers and an unflattering special counsel report released on Feb. 8. Biden, according to Special Counsel Robert Hur, is a "well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."