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The decision to join the platform on Saturday could help the
former president reach younger voters in his third bid for the
White House. He is in a close race with Democratic incumbent Joe
Biden ahead of the Nov. 5 presidential election.
Biden's election campaign is already on TikTok, with over
340,000 followers, although Biden has signed a bill that would
ban the app, which is used by 170 million Americans, if its
Chinese owner ByteDance fails to divest it.
Trump posted a launch video on his account, which has the
address @realdonaldtrump, on Saturday night. The video, which
has more than 56 million views, showed Trump greeting fans at an
Ultimate Fighting Championship fight in Newark, New Jersey.
Trump said a statement he would "use every tool available to
speak directly with the American people..."
ByteDance is challenging in courts the law that requires it to
sell TikTok by next January or face a ban. The White House says
it wants to see Chinese-based ownership ended on national
security grounds.
TikTok has argued it will not share U.S. user data with the
Chinese government and that it has taken substantial measures to
protect the privacy of its users.
Trump's attempt to ban TikTok in 2020 when he was president was
blocked by the courts. He said in March that the platform was a
national security threat but also that a ban on it would hurt
some young people and only strengthen Meta Platforms' Facebook,
which he has strongly criticized.
Trump already has an active social media presence with more than
87 million followers on X and over 7 million followers on his
own platform, Truth Social, where he posts almost daily.
A U.S. appeals court last week set a fast-track schedule to
consider the legal challenges to the new law.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ordered
the case set for oral arguments in September after TikTok,
ByteDance and a group of TikTok content creators joined with the
Justice Department earlier this month in asking the court for a
quick schedule.
(Reporting by Jahnavi Nidumolu in Bengaluru and Jasper Ward in
Washington; Additional reporting by Nathan Layne and Costas
Pitas; Editing by Ross Colvin, Nick Zieminski and Stephen
Coates)
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