After considering banning it when he was president, Donald Trump arrives on the social network TikTok

Le président Trump n'est pas à un paradoxe près. MAXPPP – MIKE THEILER

The candidate for the White House published a launch video on his account on the night of Saturday June 2 to Sunday June 3.

Republican candidate for the White House, Donald Trump, has launched on TikTok, the short video social media platform owned by the Chinese technology giant ByteDance and which he had tried under his presidency to ban it.

According to news site Politico, which first reported the news, Donald Trump posted a launch video to his account on Saturday night. The video shows the billionaire greeting fans at an Ultimate Fighting Championship fight in Newark, New Jersey.

Already nearly 500,000 followers

The President Donald J. Trump account, whose address is @realdonaldtrump, had more than 450,000 followers as of 0800 GMT. ByteDance is challenging in court a US law that came into effect in April requiring it to divest TikTok's assets in the US by January or face a ban.

The US cited national security reasons for the law, which was overwhelmingly passed by Congress, with Washington saying it feared the data of the app's American users would be passed to Chinese authorities, a claim TikTok denies.

Donald Trump's attempt to ban TikTok in 2020, when he was president, was blocked by the courts. Donald Trump declared in March that the platform posed a national security threat, but noted that a ban would hurt some young users and would only strengthen Facebook’s Meta Platforms, a platform he has been a vocal critic of. Joe Biden’s November campaign has also been on TikTok since February.