(Reuters) – Within hours of joining TikTok, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump attracted 1 million followers on Sunday on the short-video social media platform he tried to ban as president on national security grounds.
The decision to join the platform will help the former president reach younger voters in his third attempt to enter the White House. He is in a close race with current Democratic President Joe Biden ahead of the presidential elections scheduled for November 5.
Biden's election campaign is already on TikTok, although Biden has signed a bill that would ban the app, which is used by 170 million Americans, if its Chinese owner ByteDance fails to divest from it.
Trump posted the launch video on his account, titled @realdonaldtrump, on Saturday evening. The video showed Trump greeting fans at the Ultimate Fighting Championship match in Newark, New Jersey.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
ByteDance is challenging the law in court that requires it to sell TikTok by next January or face a ban. The White House says it wants to end Chinese ownership for national security reasons.
TikTok said it will not share US user data with the Chinese government and that it has taken substantive measures to protect the privacy of its users.
Trump's attempt to ban TikTok in 2020 while he was president was blocked by the courts. He said in March that the platform posed a national security threat, but also banning it would hurt some young people and would only strengthen Facebook's (NASDAQ:) meta-platforms, which he has harshly criticized.
Trump already has an active social media presence with more than 87 million followers on X and more than 7 million followers on his own platform, Truth Social, where he posts almost daily.
Last week, the US Court of Appeals set a quick timeline to consider legal challenges to the new law.
The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ordered the case set for oral arguments in September after TikTok, ByteDance and a group of TikTok content creators joined the Justice Department earlier this month to ask the court for an expedited timeline.
