by WASHINGTON (AP) — When President Joe Biden demonstrated his impromptu during a campaign stop at a public golf course in Michigan last month, the moment was captured on TikTok.
Pushed inside by a rainstorm, he competed with 13-year-old Hurley “HJ” Coleman IV to make putts on a practice mat. Coleman’s family posted a video of the proceedings on the app – and Biden posted a putt as the teenager knocked on his home in response, captioned, “I had to spill the beans.”
The network television cameras that usually follow the president were stuck outside.
Biden signed legislation on Wednesday that could ban TikTok in the United States and his campaign has embraced the platform and tried to work with influencers. Already struggling to retain his previous support from younger voters, the president is facing criticism from some avid users of the app, which researchers found is the primary news source of a third of Americans under 30 it’s an age.
“It is hypocrisy central to the Biden administration to support a TikTok ban while at the same time using TikTok for the purposes of his campaign,” said Kahlil Greene, who has more than 650,000 followers and is known on TikTok as the “Gen Z Historian.”
“I think it shows that he and his family know the power and need of TikTok.”
The Biden campaign defends his approach and rejects the idea that White House policy is at odds with his political efforts.
“We would be foolish to write off anywhere that people are getting information about the president,” said Rob Flaherty, who ran the White House Office of Digital Strategy and is now deputy manager of Biden’s re-election campaign.
Flaherty said Biden’s team created a relationship with TikTok influencers in the 2020 election and the platform has only grown in influence since then, “growing as an internet search engine and driving stories about the president.”
The Biden campaign says that the increasingly fragmented modern media environment demands that it meet voters where they are and that TikTok is one of many such places where potential supporters see its content, as well as platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
He has produced his own TikTok content, but has also relied on everyday users interacting with the president. That includes a post from a family who ate fries and other fixings from the Cook Out fast-food chain during Biden’s recent visit to Raleigh, North Carolina, as well as a video of Coleman’s speech.
TikTok’s opponents say ownership by the Chinese company ByteDance gives Beijing dangerous influence over the stories Americans see as well as potential access to US user data. China’s national-security laws allow the ruling Communist Party wide latitude in private business, although the US has not publicly provided evidence that the Chinese government manipulated the app or forced ByteDance to do its bidding.
The law signed by Biden on Wednesday would have forced ByteDance to sell the app to a US company within a year or face a national ban. ByteDance has argued that the law violates the First Amendment and has vowed to sue.
Former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, is now publicly opposed to banning TikTok after issuing an executive order while in office seeking to ban the app unless ByteDance sells it.
The White House does not have an official TikTok account and Biden banned the app from most government devices in December 2022. But the Biden campaign also officially joined TikTok on the night of this year’s Super Bowl, and the president eschewing the traditional gameday TV interview. spreading a political message with the platform instead.
Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki held a virtual briefing in 2022 for more than two dozen influencers on the app to discuss the U.S. approach to Ukraine, a meeting later aired on “Saturday Night Live. “
There have been scores of other such events, including an impact party at the White House last Christmas and a State of the Union watch party in March. During Biden’s recent $26 million campaign fundraiser at Radio City Music Hall in New York with former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, there was a happy hour and after-party where the influencers interacted with Biden .
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the legislation signed by Biden is not a ban. This is about our national security.” She added that the White House is not saying “we don’t want Americans to use TikTok.”
TikTok has 170 million US users and a study released by the Pew Research Center last November found that about a third of US adults under 30 regularly received news from TikTok, compared to 14% of adults.
Adults under the age of 30 are more likely than US adults to oppose a ban on the use of TikTok in the United States, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in January. Nearly half of 18- to 29-year-olds oppose it, compared to 35% of US adults.
About 2 in 10 US adults said they use TikTok at least once a day, including 44% of 18- to 29-year-olds. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 7% say they use TikTok “almost always” and an additional 28% use it “a few times a day.”
Priorities USA, a prominent Democratic super PAC, is spending about $1 million this cycle to help fund more than 100 TikTok influencers producing pro-Biden content before November, and looks to the these efforts as an extension of traditional organizing and communication initiatives.
Even if TikTok is eventually banned, most of its influencers are on other platforms that could continue to accept their content, especially YouTube and Instagram, said Danielle Butterfield, executive director of Priorities USA.
“TikTok users are generally online and that’s a lot of different places,” said Butterfield, who was also deputy director of digital advertising for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Meanwhile, Biden’s standing with young people has deteriorated. About one-third of adults under 30 approve of how he’s handling his job as president, according to a March AP-NORC poll — a sharp drop from the roughly two-thirds who approved when he first took office. once.
Greene studied history at Yale, served as the school’s first Black student body president and graduated in 2022. He has attended past White House events as an influencer, including a Juneteenth celebration and event in the West Wing for the Inflation Reduction Act, large and comprehensive health care. green energy package, where he met with both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
About a year ago, however, Greene says he began posting about Biden’s support of a 1994 criminal law that activists have long said contributed to the mass incarceration of racial minorities. He also criticized the current Biden administration for what he called a “lack of specific policies made for Black Americans.”
Since then, while Greene continues to receive more general emails from the Biden administration, he said he is no longer invited to more personal events even though some “fallen in line, less critical creators” still go.
Flaherty, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, said the campaign has paid influencers in specific cases, such as when their content has been used in ads, and that some content creators working with the campaign are concerned about legislation that pressures divestment. But he doesn’t see it having much of an impact on Election Day.
“I think young voters are not going to vote on TikTok,” Flaherty said. “They are going to vote on issues that are discussed on TikTok but are also discussed elsewhere.”
However, Greene said young voters’ frustration with the Biden administration in other areas — particularly its handling of the Israel-Hamas war — combined with the TikTok divestment legislation to spell political trouble for Biden.
“I cannot exaggerate how that increases the outcry,” he said, “and the discontent that people already have.”
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Associated Press writer Linley Sanders contributed to this report.
