TikTok influencers who visited the White House feel betrayed now Biden is ... trends now
TikTok and social media political influencers who were invited to the White House last week are surprised that President Joe Biden and Congressional Democrats have endorsed the bill to ban the popular social media video app.
The House voted 352-65 Wednesday in favor of the bill that would ban the app, as only 50 Democrats and 15 Republicans voted against it.
Keith Edwards, an influencer with over 14,000 followers on TikTok said it was not a good look for Biden, who continues struggling with young voters.
'It's not going to have an electoral impact, because voters don't consider things real until it actually happens,' he said in an interview with the DailyMail.com
'But it's not great we're talking about this when Joe Biden had finally shifted the vibes for him in a positive direction.'
Social media influencer Keith Edwards told the Daily Mail that Biden and Democrats were sending the wrong message to young people
Gen Z activist and TikToker Johnny Palmadessa said he relied on the platform to communicate with young people
Biden's outreach to over 70 different social media influencers for the State of the Union speech last week sent the message to content creators that he and his campaign were serious about courting young people on TikTok and other social media platforms.
Edwards said he was not concerned about losing the TikTok platform entirely, but warned political content creators to spread their influence across multiple different platforms.
'TikTok's not going away. Someone will buy it, but creators need to spread their bets because between this, Meta's incoming shadow ban on political content, and Elon Musk destroying Twitter ... you can't just depend on one platform anymore,' he said.
Edwards has over 90,000 followers on Meta's Threads platform and 136,000 followers on X.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that Biden continued to support the bill that would ban the app and would sign it if it got to his desk.
'We hope the Senate takes action, and takes this up very quickly,' Jean-Pierre said to reporters on Air Force One.
Gen Z activist Johnny Palmadessa, who has 26,000 followers on TikTok, also expressed his surprise after House Democrats joined with Republicans to pass the bill that would force TikTok's China-based company ByteDance to sell the app or ban it in the United States.
'TikTok links young Americans to opportunities — and as a Gen-Z TikToker, I find myself reliant on the platform for communication,' he told the Daily Mail. 'This merely underscores Congress's disconnect in making decisions they already don't comprehend.'
Palmadessa was also at the White House event last week and has over 100,000 followers on Threads and 16,000 followers
