By Mallory Mattingly
A recent move from the White House might signal that TikTok is here to stay.
This week, the White House created a TikTok account with the handle @whitehouse. The account then posted a video of President Donald Trump with the caption, “America, we are BACK! What’s up, TikTok?”
The video includes a clip from one of President Trump’s speeches.
“Every day I wake up determined to deliver a better life for the people all across this nation. I am your voice,” he said.
Related: How Americans’ Feelings About TikTok Ban Changed
@whitehouse America we are BACK! What’s up TikTok?
The White House’s launch on the popular social media app signals a positive outlook for the hotly contested platform’s future in the country,
Reuters reported, “Trump has a soft spot for the popular app, crediting it with helping him gain support among young voters when he defeated Democrat Kamala Harris in the November 2024 presidential election.”
On Wednesday, MSNBC asked the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt if TikTok is a danger to national security.
“The Trump administration is committed to communicating the historic successes President Trump has delivered to the American people with as many audiences and platforms as possible,” Leavitt responded. “President Trump’s message dominated TikTok during his presidential campaign, and we’re excited to build upon those successes and communicate in a way no other administration has before.”
This is a flip from Trump’s previous stance regarding the app during his first term. In 2020, he issued an executive order against TikTok, citing national security concerns, saying apps developed in China “threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”
TikTok, a video-sharing mobile application owned by the Chinese company ByteDance Ltd., has reportedly been downloaded over 175 million times in the United States and over one billion times globally. TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories. This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.
However, now Trump has changed his tune and, since the beginning of his second term, has fought to keep TikTok alive in the U.S., extending the deadline for its ban several times since January.
However, last month, commerce secretary Howard Lutnick warned that TikTok would “go dark” on Sept. 17 if China doesn’t “agree to American control over the app.”
But the White House’s debut on the controversial platform just confirms that the Trump administration doesn’t want that to happen.
Read Next: President Trump Likely to Keep TikTok Online Despite Looming Deadline
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