Biden Campaign Joins TikTok Despite FBI Warning That It Is a National Security Threat

President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign has joined the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok despite persistent warnings from various officials — including within his own administration — that it represents a national security threat.

After creating an account called @bidenhq, the campaign posted a video of Biden talking about the Super Bowl with the caption, “lol hey guys.” TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance and is therefore obligated to share any data harvested by the Chinese government with it.

The company has also tracked the movements of journalists reporting on it. It has also been accused of propagating a mass amount of anti-Semitic content in the wake of Hamas’ terrorist attack in Israel last year.

FBI director Christopher Wray has given voice to the various concerns over the platform’s potentially malign influence by telling Congress that it “screams out with national security concerns” last March. “This is a tool that is ultimately within the control of the Chinese government,” said Wray during a Senate hearing.

Retired Army General Paul Nakasone, who served as the director of the National Security Agency and United States Cyber Command from 2018 until this month, argued last year that “TikTok is a loaded gun at our nation’s head.”

As recently as last year, Biden threatened to ban TikTok if it was not sold to a new parent company not affiliated with or beholden to the Chinese government.

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), the chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, has described TikTok as “digital fentanyl.”

“So long as TikTok—and control of its algorithm—remain in the grip of the Chinese Communist Party, we are ceding the ability to censor Americans’ speech to a foreign adversary,” he argued.