The Atlantic: “What is Joe Biden doing on TikTok?”

On Monday evening, Jon Stewart returned to the hosting chair of The Daily Show after nearly a decade away—and he spent a nontrivial portion of his opening segment roasting Joe Biden’s first TikTok video. That post, which the Biden-Harris campaign uploaded during the Super Bowl on Sunday, featured the president answering silly, rapid-fire questions about the big game: Jason Kelce or Travis Kelce? The performance was cheeky but decidedly low energy. Biden’s voice is a little raspy, and at one point, he gets very excited about chocolate-chip cookies.

Stewart played the clip in the context of the press’s multiday fixation on Biden’s age. When it ended, he eyed the camera and offered some advice to the campaign’s social team. Fire everyone, he deadpanned. Everyone. How do you go on TikTok and end up looking older? The audience howled.

Charlie Warzel

The Biden campaign joining TikTok is the final nail in the coffin for any meaningful regulation of TikTok in the US – not that this was in any way likely to begin with. Leave it to US politicians to always put their electoral chances above the interests of the constituents they’re supposed to represent.

In February 2023, the White House gave all federal agencies 30 days to wipe TikTok off all government devices, as the Chinese-owned social media app comes under increasing scrutiny in Washington over security concerns. AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File

The point is that it’s harder than ever for a political candidate to purposefully attract or direct attention. There are so many eyeballs, in so many different places, that it is tough for any one thing on any platform to matter in the same way it did in 2016 or 2020. Conversations can still coalesce around a single topic—unfortunately for the Biden campaign, the president’s age is currently one of those stories—but these are not moments candidates can control, and they don’t flow from social media the way they used to. No candidate illustrates this better than Trump, whose time in the fever swamps of Truth Social has left his online presence severely diminished. His all-caps posts, which would’ve led cable news in 2016, barely register in the press today.

The article does a pretty good job of assessing the pros and cons of a TikTok presence for the purposes of a presidential campaign, but, just as most American media outlets, stays silent on another of those ‘unfortunate’ stories for Biden: his staunch support for Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s cruel military campaign in Gaza. No amount of TikTok-ing will be enough to divert attention away from this issue, especially for TikTok’s young demographic.