After vowing to ban it, White House now launches official TikTok account
The Bytedance TikTok logo and an American flag are seen in this illustration photo taken in Warsaw, Poland on January 20, 2025.
What you need to know:
- The account posted its debut video on Tuesday, featuring Trump.
The White House launched an official TikTok account on Tuesday, less than a month before US President Donald Trump's deadline for the social media app to either find a new owner or face a ban in the United States.
The account posted its debut video on Tuesday afternoon -- a 27-second clip featuring footage of Trump walking and interacting with his supporters, accompanied by audio from his acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention.
A few hours after the debut video, the account has garnered over 57,000 followers, while the TikTok account Trump used for his presidential campaign last year has more than 15 million followers.
In his first term, Trump signed an executive order effectively seeking to ban the app, owned by the Chinese firm ByteDance, in the country unless ByteDance sold its US operations to a US company. The order did not go into effect amid legal challenges.
Since his second term, Trump has extended the deadline twice, each by 75 days on Jan. 20 and April 4, respectively. On June 19, Trump signed an executive order to keep TikTok running in the United States for another 90 days, extending the deadline to Sept. 17, 2025.
