White House launches official TikTok account
WASHINGTON: The White House launched an official TikTok account on Tuesday, less than a month before President Donald Trump’s deadline for the social-media app to secure 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 supporters, accompanied by audio from his acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention.
Within hours of its first video, the account had garnered more than 57,000 followers, while the TikTok profile Trump used during his presidential campaign last year has amassed over 15 million followers.
In his first term, Trump signed an executive order effectively seeking to ban the app, owned by the Chinese firm ByteDance, unless the company sold its US operations to an American buyer. The order did not take effect owing to legal challenges.
Since the start of his second term, Trump has extended the deadline twice, each time by 75 days on January 20 and April 4. On June 19, he signed a further executive order to keep TikTok running in the United States for another 90 days, pushing the deadline back to September 17, 2025.
https://www.tiktok.com/@whitehouse?lang=en
