Trump, Biden battle for youth vote on TikTok

However, Shoshana Weissmann, digital director and policy fellow at the R Street Institute, cautioned that people can sometimes overestimate the effectiveness of new social media. 

“Snapchat, years ago, had promised that if you join Snapchat, you’ll get all these young voters, but no one was on Snapchat to learn about politics,” Weissmann said, pointing to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s decision to join the platform amid her 2016 presidential campaign.

“TikTok is different, and I think it has a bigger value there, but I still think people sometimes overestimate how effective new shiny social media is,” she added. 

Both Biden and Trump also face varying accusations of hypocrisy related to TikTok, Weissmann noted. 

Biden, for his part, signed legislation in late April requiring TikTok’s China-based parent company ByteDance to sell the app within roughly a year or face a ban on U.S. app stores and networks. The bill sailed through Congress amid growing bipartisan concerns about national security…

Trump similarly attempted to ban the app through an executive order while in office, but the order was blocked in court.

However, as Congress considered the divest-or-ban bill earlier this year, the former president reversed course, coming out against a potential TikTok ban and claiming it would benefit Facebook.

Notably, the shift came after Trump met with Jeff Yass, a major GOP donor and investor in TikTok, although the former president said they did not discuss the app. 

“Trump had wanted to ban TikTok, and now he’s all in on it,” Weissmann told The Hill. “And I think that’s both for politics and maybe donors too.” 

“Then with President Biden signing the ban and still being on TikTok, it’s just ridiculous,” she continued. “Because if anyone should be concerned about the cybersecurity effects of TikTok, it should probably be the people closest to the President of the United States.”  

“I don’t think their play is really going to be worth it for them,” she added. “In the process of it, they’re just going to make themselves look really hypocritical.”