Vice President Kamala Harris and her campaign have embraced TikTok and are catching up to former President Donald Trump in using the social media app as a tool to mobilize, rally and communicate with supporters. But unlike Trump, Harris has so far failed to say that, if elected, she would abandon the Biden-Harris administration’s misguided effort to ban the app, which would be an obvious violation of First Amendment rights. She shouldn’t be let off the hook for this hypocrisy.
Immediately following President Biden’s exit from the race last month, the Harris team took over the campaign’s TikTok account, changed its name to @KamalaHQ, and quickly began amassing followers on the app. Now with three million followers, her campaign account is getting a lot of eyeballs, with some posts garnering millions of views. And she has had even more success with her newly-launched personal TikTok account, @KamalaHarris, which already has 4.1 million followers. While both account tallies still trail Trump’s remarkable 9.7 million @RealDonaldTrump followers, the gap is narrowing.
Harris supporters have similarly embraced the app, posting endless coconut-themed memes celebrating a story told by Harris about her mother and referencing a TikTok post from British pop artist Charli XCX, where she apparently backed Harris, calling her “brat.” Newsweek summed up the phenomena, reporting that TikTok has been “flooded with positive content about Vice President Kamala Harris…” and highlighting that more than 85,000 videos about Harris were posted on the app shortly after Biden endorsed her as his replacement. NBC News noted that “some political strategists say the memes are helping Harris generate a level of organic social media clout among Gen Z that Biden ha[d] struggled to cultivate…”
Harris and her team are eager to capitalize on this TikTok momentum further, with plans to host more than 200 influencers from TikTok and other platforms at this month’s Democratic Convention in Chicago. If the app were really such a security threat, why promote its use at the party’s nominating convention?
Despite her success in reaching young people, women, and other diverse audiences on TikTok, which are key voting blocks in the election, Harris has so far said little about what she would do with the app if elected. According to Axios, when pressed on the issue, a campaign spokesperson would only say that she “would like to see a change in ownership,” indicating her support for the recently enacted legislation that would require TikTok to divest its ownership of any Chinese interests or face a ban.
However, divestment is not a serious option, at least not within the timeframe envisioned by the legislation. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has argued that divestment is “not possible technologically, commercially, or legally.” So Harris’s support for divestment is effectively the same thing as supporting an outright ban.
Trump, meanwhile, has taken a very different stance. During his administration, he successfully pressured TikTok to agree to stringent safeguards of U.S. user data and monitoring of app content. Under TikTok’s proposed “Project Texas,” all U.S. user data was turned over to U.S.-owned Oracle, outside the reach of China-based employees. The company also offered to have its content moderation closely monitored by an American board controlled by U.S. government officials. The Washington Post described it as “an extraordinary deal.” But instead of accepting this win, the Biden-Harris administration walked away from the negotiating table and later threw its support behind the divestment/ban bill.
In contrast, Trump now rejects efforts to ban the app and in a recent TikTok post of his own said: “I’m gonna save TikTok.” His Vice Presidential running mate, J.D. Vance, is notably following Trump’s lead, recently launching his own TikTok account with a guest appearance from the popular influencer group, the Nelk Boys.
On the one hand, Trump and his campaign are taking a consistent and principled position, using the app to reach key constituencies and pledging to protect the app if elected. And on the other hand, we have Harris and her campaign, cynically using and promoting the app for electoral gain, while supporting a policy that would ban the app and threaten the First Amendment rights of TikTok’s more than 170 million American users. The Harris hypocrisy on this issue is clear for all to see.
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