Plot To Woo Gen Z Voters? Trump’s Tiktok Truimph

Former US president Donald Trump has found glory on TikTok, gaining over 5.4 million followers and over 80 million views within three days of joining the platform.

Trump debuted on the app with a triumphant entry at the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) in a video that has since gone viral.

“It is my honour,” Trump says in the video.

This comes amid the fight to ban Tiktok in America. A move that seeks to force Bytedance, Tiktok’s parent company to sell it’s rights to another company.

A law signed by President Biden, through ‘speculative concerns’, seeks to protect data privacy of 170 Million American users, claiming that it would fall in the hands of the Chinese government or be used for propaganda.

The scuffle has seen Tiktok fight back with a lawsuit, calling the act ‘an extraordinary intrusion of free speech rights’.

Donald Trump has in the past, during his presidency, proposed a TikTok ban. It is not until recently that Trump became pro-Tiktok stating that a Tiktok ban would make Meta, Facebook’s parent company, too powerful slamming it as ‘An enemy of the People’.

Trump’s shift is speculated to be influenced by Tiktok’s readiness to donate to his campaign, a charity act that Facebook has turned their back on.

Tiktok, the app that ‘moves’ Gen Z, has been a force to reckon with when it comes to cause-mobilization. In light of America’s Elections in November, the question of whether Trump’s new move is a plot to woo Gen Z voters lingers, given their importance in this year’s election.

This comes after Trump was found guilty on all 34 counts of felony charges against him, a trial which he termed as rigged and disgraceful. Trump is set to be sentenced on July 11, days before his expected nomination as the Republican ticket bearer.