Journalists and commentators responded to former President Trump's surprise decision to create a TikTok account, quickly eclipsing President Biden's presence on the platform.
"Donald Trump joining TikTok is going to be huge, you watch," former Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage posted to X on Sunday. "Gen Z are crying out for leadership."
As of Monday afternoon, Trump had over 4 million followers after posting his first video Saturday night. Biden, who created an account four months prior, had roughly 347,000 followers.
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"Trump has (unsurprisingly) joined tiktok," ex-social media producer for Sen. John Fetterman's campaign, Annie Wu, wrote. "In his first day he amassed 3.3M followers and received 3.2M likes on his first video[.]"
"Hopefully the numbers won’t continue to be so bad for Biden vs Trump on tiktok," she wrote in another post. "Or else it will be like a very public and bad poll, a massive ratio, everyday for all to see," Wu continued. "To be clear, this likely won’t impact anything actually electoral — mainly it would just be embarrassing[.]"
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Trump's decision to bring his campaign to TikTok comes despite his attempts to ban the app as president.
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee's first post was a launch video on Saturday night on a verified account — @realDonaldTrump — showing him waving to fans at an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fight in Newark, New Jersey, that he attended a few hours earlier.
The move appears to be an effort to connect with younger voters who frequent the app, as Trump faces off with Biden in a 2024 election rematch. The main super PAC supporting Trump, MAGA Inc., joined TikTok a few weeks ago. The site has roughly 170 million users in the U.S.
The app appears to be friendly ground for the former president, with roughly twice as many pro-Trump posts compared to pro-Biden posts on the site, according to recent reports from The New York Times and Puck, which cited internal analysis from TikTok.
Fox News' Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.
