If President Joe Biden keeps his promise to sign a ban on TikTok over its ties to the Chinese government, the 81-year-old may rob his reelection campaign of a platform that he and fellow Democrats rely on to reach younger voters.
Biden’s campaign got thousands of likes on Tuesday for a TikTok video skewering Republican rival Donald Trump about cutting Social Security spending. But the comments were focused on another issue altogether: the proposed ban.
Good thing we saw this on TikTok, said one. How are you going to use this to campaign if you ban it? asked another.
House Republicans voted Wednesday to force TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to divest its 170 million user U.S. business, or face a ban. If the Senate passes the bill, as the White House urges, Biden has pledged to sign it.
But the 2024 campaign is shaping up to be close, and Democratic-leaning U.S. political discourse online has shifted to TikTok in recent years, political strategists say. They note that X, formerly Twitter, has cut back on harassment curbs under owner Elon Musk while Facebook moved away from political content while the short-form video site is the platform of choice for a new generation of politically engaged Americans.
TikTok’s users belong disproportionately to groups that vote reliably for Democrats, which Biden needs to woo. Trump’s campaign does not have an official TikTok account.
Roughly 60% of TikTok’s regular U.S. news consumers are Democrats or Democrat-leaning, according to a 2023 study from the Pew Research Center. Nineteen percent of TikTok’s news consumers are Black, and 30% are Hispanic, versus about 14% and 19% of the general U.S. population, respectively. About 44% of news consumers on TikTok are between ages 18 and 29.
Banning TikTok risks displacing a large part of the electorate from the ability to communicate…meaningfully about politics at a time when a highly contentious election is about to occur, said Samuel Woolley, journalism professor and director of the University of Texas at Austin’s propaganda research lab.
We voted Joe Biden in through social media, through the power of TikTok, said NaomiHearts, a self-described Chicana trans woman with 1.1 million followers on TikTok, noting that youth voter participation hit a record in 2020. Why just TikTok?
A ban would take away young voters favorite social media app where they get their news, where they follow their favorite people where they get entertainment, where they’re allowed to basically escape, said Dr. Anthony Youn, a plastic surgeon with 8.4 million TikTok followers.
The measure is the latest in a series of moves in Washington to respond to national security concerns about China, from connected vehicles to artificial intelligence to cranes at U.S. ports.
This is a critical national security issue, No. 2 House Republican Steve Scalise said on social media platform X.
TikTok denies sharing any user data with China and says the ban would deprive Americans of their Constitutional right to free expression.
