“Well I’ve heard that recently, I’ve been on the For You page, so I thought I’d get on here myself,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in her new personal account’s first post on TikTok, the Chinese-owned short-form video platform on which she’s become a seemingly overnight sensation since launching her campaign for President earlier this week.
Within six hours of joining TikTok on Thursday, Harris had already amassed more than one million followers.
President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in February created a campaign TikTok account, @bidenhq, which was rebranded earlier this week to @KamalaHQ and has since more than quadrupled in followers to over 1.6 million.
“Our job as a campaign is to break through the noise and make sure we’re talking to voters wherever they are—TikTok is one of those landscapes, and we’re leaving no stone unturned,” deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty told People in a statement on Thursday. “Getting the Vice President up on TikTok means she’ll be able to directly engage with a key constituency in a way that’s true and authentic to the platform and the audience.”
Harris’ nascent presidential campaign and its supporters have leaned into the new presumptive Democratic nominee’s social media virality, embracing “brat” and “coconut tree” memes in an apparent attempt to engage with younger voters that’s already appearing to pay dividends.
According to a new Axios/Generation Lab poll, among 18- to 34-year-olds, Harris has more than triple the lead over Trump (+20%) compared to what Biden had (+6%).
Harris joins TikTok—which Trump joined in June—as the platform has come under increasing bipartisan scrutiny in the U.S., largely due to security concerns about its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance.
Harris told ABC News in a March interview that the Biden-Harris administration doesn’t plan to ban TikTok, which she said has “very important” benefits, including as a platform for people to make money and share information. “We need to deal with the owner and we have national security concerns about the owner of TikTok, but we have no intention to ban TikTok,” she said.
However, Biden signed into law in April a bill that requires ByteDance to divest its stake in TikTok, which the company has said it will not do, within a year or face a ban in the U.S.
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