About a day after joining TikTok, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump attracted 3 million followers on the short video social platform he once tried to ban on national security grounds.
The decision to join the platform on Saturday may help the former president attract younger voters in his third bid for the White House. He is in a heated race against incumbent Democratic President Joe Biden ahead of the November 5 presidential election.
Biden's campaign already has over 340,000 followers on TikTok, despite Biden signing a bill that would ban TikTok if its Chinese parent company ByteDance fails to sell the app. Currently, 170 million Americans use the app.
Trump posted a kick-off video on Saturday evening, with his account address @realdonaldtrump. The video, which shows Trump greeting fans at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event in Newark, New Jersey, has been viewed more than 56 million times.
In a statement, Trump said he would "use all available tools to directly communicate with the American people..."
ByteDance is legally challenging the requirement to sell TikTok by January next year or face a ban. The White House says it wants to end the Chinese company's ownership due to national security concerns.
TikTok argues that it does not share U.S. user data with the Chinese government and has taken extensive measures to protect user privacy.
Trump's attempt to ban TikTok in 2020 as president was blocked by the courts. He stated in March this year that the platform is a national security threat but also noted that banning it would harm some young people and only bolster Meta-owned Facebook, which he has strongly criticized.
Trump already has an active presence on other social media platforms, with over 87 million followers on X and over 7 million on his own platform, Truth Social, where he posts almost daily.
The U.S. Court of Appeals last week set an expedited schedule to consider the legal challenges to the new law.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ordered the case to be heard in oral arguments in September, after TikTok, ByteDance, and a group of TikTok content creators jointly requested the court to set an expedited schedule earlier this month with the Justice Department.
