WASHINGTON (AP) — When President Joe Biden showed off his putting during a campaign stop at a public golf course in Michigan last month, the moment was captured on TikTok.
When a rainstorm forced him inside, he competed with 13-year-old Hurley “HJ” Coleman IV to make putts on a practice mat. The Coleman family posted a video of the proceedings on the app — complete with Biden punching a hole and the teen hitting home his own shot in response, above the caption: “I had to sink the rebuttal.”
The network television cameras that normally follow the president were stuck outside.
Biden signed legislation on Wednesday that could ban TikTok in the US, as his campaign has embraced the platform and sought to work with influencers. Already struggling to maintain his previous support from younger voters, the president now faces criticism from some avid users of the app, which researchers say is a primary news source for a third of Americans under 30.
“There is a core hypocrisy in the Biden administration supporting the TikTok ban while simultaneously using TikTok for its campaign purposes,” said Kahlil Greene, who has more than 650,000 followers and is known on TikTok as the “Gen Z historian.”
“I think it illustrates that he and his people know the power and necessity of TikTok.”
The Biden campaign is defending its approach and rejecting the idea that White House policies contradict his political efforts.
“It would be foolish to write off every place where people get information about the president,” said Rob Flaherty, who led the White House Office of Digital Strategy and is now deputy manager of Biden’s reelection campaign.
Flaherty said Biden’s team built relationships with TikTok influencers during the 2020 election and that the platform has only become more influential since then, “growing as an internet search engine and driving stories about the president.”
The Biden campaign says an increasingly fragmented modern media environment requires meeting voters where they are and that TikTok is one of several places where potential supporters can see its content, joining platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
It has produced its own TikTok content, but also relied on regular users to interact with the president. That includes a post from a family who ate fries and other ingredients from the fast-food chain Cook Out when Biden recently visited Raleigh, North Carolina, as well as Coleman’s putting video.
Opponents of TikTok say its ownership by Chinese company ByteDance gives Beijing a dangerous amount of influence over the stories Americans see, as well as potential access to American user data. China’s national security laws give the ruling Communist Party wide latitude over private companies, although the US has provided no public evidence that the Chinese government manipulated the app or forced ByteDance to do its bidding.
The law that Biden signed on Wednesday would force ByteDance to sell the app to a U.S. company within a year or risk a national ban. ByteDance has argued that the law violates the First Amendment and has vowed to sue.
Former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, is now publicly opposing a TikTok ban after issuing an executive order while in office banning the app if ByteDance did not sell it.
The White House does not have an official TikTok account, and Biden banned the app on most government devices in December 2022. Yet the Biden campaign also officially joined TikTok on the night of this year’s Super Bowl, as the president eschewed a traditional gameday TV interview. to instead spread a political message with the platform.
Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki convened a virtual briefing for more than two dozen of the app’s influencers in 2022 to discuss the U.S. approach to Ukraine, a meeting that was later parodied on “Saturday Night Live.”
There have been numerous other similar events, including an influencer party at the White House last Christmas and a State of the Union watch party in March. At Biden’s recent $26 million campaign fundraiser at New York’s Radio City Music Hall with former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, there was an influencer happy hour and an after-party where attendees interacted with Biden.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the legislation Biden signed “is not a ban. This is about our national security.” She added that the White House is not saying “we don’t want Americans to use TikTok.”
TikTok has 170 million U.S. users, and a survey published last November by the Pew Research Center found that about a third of U.S. adults under 30 regularly got news from TikTok, compared to 14% of all adults.
According to an AP-NORC poll conducted in January, adults under 30 are more likely than U.S. adults overall to oppose a ban on TikTok use in the United States. Nearly half of 18- to 29-year-olds are opposed, compared to 35% of U.S. adults.
About 2 in 10 U.S. adults said they used TikTok at least once a day, including 44% of 18- to 29-year-olds. Among 18 to 29 year olds, 7% say they use TikTok “almost constantly” and another 28% use it “several times a day.”
Priorities USA, a leading Democratic super PAC, is spending about $1 million this cycle to fund more than 100 TikTok influencers to produce pro-Biden content before November, viewing these efforts as an extension of traditional organizing and communications initiatives.
Even if TikTok is ultimately banned, most influencers are on other platforms that could continue to use their content, especially YouTube and Instagram, said Danielle Butterfield, executive director of Priorities USA.
“TikTok users are generally online and that’s a lot of different places,” said Butterfield, who was also deputy director of digital advertising for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Biden has now seen his position among young people decline. About a third of adults under 30 approve of the way he is handling his job as president, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in March — a sharp decline from the roughly two-thirds who approved when he first came to power.
Greene studied history at Yale, was the school’s first black student body president and will graduate in 2022. He attended previous White House events as an influencer, including a Juneteenth celebration and a West Wing event for the Inflation Reduction Act, a sweeping health care and green energy package, where he met with both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
About a year ago, however, Greene says he began posting about Biden’s support of a sweeping 1994 crime law that activists have long said contributed to the mass incarceration of racial minorities. He also criticized the current Biden administration for what he called “a lack of specific policies for Black Americans.”
Although Greene has since continued to receive more general emails from the Biden administration, he says he is no longer being invited to more in-person events, while some “creators who were in line and are less critical” are still continuing.
Flaherty, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, said the campaign has paid influencers in specific cases, such as when their content has been used in ads, and that some content creators working with the campaign have raised concerns about legislation forcing divestiture. But he doesn’t see this having a major impact on Election Day.
“I don’t think young voters are going to vote on TikTok,” Flaherty said. “They’re going to vote on issues that are discussed on TikTok, but that are also discussed in other places.”
However, Greene said that young voters’ frustration with the Biden administration in other areas — particularly its handling of the war between Israel and Hamas — combined with the TikTok divestment legislation has created political problems for Biden.
“I can’t exaggerate how that exacerbates the outrage,” he said, “and the dissatisfaction that people already have.”
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Associated Press writer Linley Sanders contributed to this report.