Congress tried to ban TikTok. Now the White House has an account

In less than 24 hours earlier this week, the first White House TikTok account gained nearly 150,000 followers.

“I am your voice,” President Donald Trump narrated for the first-ever White House TikTok post. The 27-second video features clips from his public appearances. The caption reads, “America we are BACK! What’s up TikTok?”

Trump stopped posting to his personal TikTok account on Nov. 5, 2024, the day he won the presidential election. He credits the platform with helping him win the popular vote, particularly among young people. Now, his team hopes to bring back the short-form videos on the new White House TikTok account.

Trump has delayed enforcement of a federal law to force TikTok off of American devices three times. Now that he has started a White House account, national security analysts worry that he’s given up on enforcing the law and is holding the door open for Chinese spying.

“The one problem we had was the bad things the Chinese Communist Party was doing with TikTok,” Hudson Institute senior fellow Michael Sobolik said. “Now we have a second problem, which is complete disregard for the rule of law.”

During his first administration, Trump signed an executive order to ban TikTok. Congress passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act last year, and former President Joe Biden signed it into law, even though both he and Trump had TikTok accounts for their respective presidential campaigns. The Supreme Court then upheld the law in January, ruling that it does not violate free speech protections to force the Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to divest from the platform for national security reasons. The law was meant to take effect on Jan. 19, forcing a sale or a ban. It allows the president to approve one 90-day extension if a sale is in the works and needs extra time to be finalized.

“There are examples of the Chinese Communist Party using this app to get Americans to distrust America,” Sobolik said. “TikTok is really dangerous, and half of America has it on their phones, and more and more Americans are turning to it for news. There’s a lot that the Chinese Communist Party can do with a tool like that, and we shouldn’t let them continue to have it.”

While TikTok itself is not housed only in China, its parent company, ByteDance, is based in Beijing. And Chinese law requires that every company there must share data with the Chinese Communist Party. Former Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., now U.S. secretary of state, began calling for investigations into TikTok in 2019.

“The danger in TikTok is not that somebody goes on that video and puts something up that looks stupid or silly,” Rubio told CBS last year in a joint interview with Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va. “Its value is it has an algorithm, a recommender engine which is one of the best in the world. … It doesn’t matter who you sell TikTok to, where their headquarters are, it doesn’t even matter where they store the data. As long as ByteDance engineers in China control the algorithm, they have to have access to American data to make it work, and that’s what we need to confront.”

After Hamas attacked Israel in 2023, TikTok videos with #freePalestine captions surpassed those that said #standwithIsrael. Videos supporting Palestine and accusing Israel of wrongdoing flooded the app. Some users uncovered former terrorist leader Osama bin Laden’s 2002 manifesto, and TikTok saw a surge in users making videos that sympathized with bin Laden’s sentiments.

“We’ve seen TikTok used to downplay the Uyghur genocide, the status of Taiwan, and now Hamas terrorism,” Rubio said in a statement after the 2023 attack. “This is further proof that the app needs to be banned and treated for what it is: foreign propaganda.”

The app went dark for roughly 170 million American users for a few hours on Jan. 20, until Trump was sworn into office. As one of his first-day actions, he signed an extension to delay the ban for 75 days. Since then, he has signed two more extensions. In April, Trump hinted that he was close to a deal with the Chinese Communist Party to comply with the law. But then the plan was scrapped after he imposed heavy tariffs on China, which then imposed high retaliatory tariffs.

“A bad deal would undermine the rule of law, create confusion, and erode trust in our legal system,” Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Mich., wrote in a March op-ed in National Review. He sponsored the original legislation to ban TikTok. “It would set a dangerous precedent for CCP influence over U.S. digital infrastructure, weakening Congress’s authority and opening the door for adversaries to exploit weaknesses in our tech ecosystem.”

In June, Trump signed another 90-day extension, saying he had a potential buyer and would announce it in roughly two weeks.

“It has never been clear where the line is between the president’s broad permissible enforcement discretion and a president’s illegal refusal to enforce the law,” American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Jack Landman Goldsmith wrote in June, when Trump signed the most recent extension. “But wherever that line is, and there is a line, the refusal to enforce the TikTok ban crosses it.”

Goldsmith pointed out that the original law only allowed for one extension, and even that required the president to submit proof of a deal in the works to Congress. But no Republican members have raised an opposition to Trump’s delays, and no one has sued for the lack of enforcement.

In response to a WORLD request for comment, Rep. Moolenaar praised bipartisan congressional efforts to oust TikTok but did not refer to the president: “These laws show a strong bipartisan commitment to protecting America’s national security, and now it’s critical that they are fully enforced. As chairman, I will continue working through the Select Committee on China to safeguard Americans’ data and ensure our adversaries cannot exploit malign platforms like TikTok to undermine our national security.”

After the June extension, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said in a statement that the company was “grateful for President Trump’s leadership and support in ensuring that TikTok continues to be available for more than 170 million American users and 7.5 million U.S. businesses that rely on the platform as we continue to work with Vice President Vance’s office.”

Trump had designated the vice president as the point person for coordinating a deal. The vice president’s office did not respond to a request for comment from WORLD before publication. But Trump has also said that he is no longer opposed to TikTok and does not want to take it away from American users.

The federal government already prohibits employees from downloading the app onto government devices. It is not clear who is running the White House account or from what device. When asked how the account is being run to comply with federal law, the White House sent a statement from press secretary Karoline Leavitt: “The Trump administration is committed to communicating the historic successes President Trump has delivered to the American people with as many audiences and platforms as possible.”