Donald Trump officially joins TikTok competitor Triller
As Donald Trump tries to get TikTok banned from the United States, the president is showing support for one of the video sharing app's competitors, Triller.
On Saturday, Trump launched his official Triller account, per a tweet from New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz. Trump's first Triller video, which acts as a mini campaign ad, features audio of the president saying, "I'm a professional at technology" and "Nobody can do it like me. Nobody can do it like me, honestly." The 15-second clip now has 1,142,524 plays and is one of three videos currently on the verified account. (The other two take jabs at Joe Biden.)
At the time of this writing, Trump had yet to reach 5,000 Triller followers, which is an incredibly low amount compared to other verified accounts. A quick browse down the "Suggested" (people to follow) page shows that Chance the Rapper has more than 233,000 followers, popular TikTok influencer Charli D'Amelio has 460,000, and Bryce Hall (one of TikTok's Sway House boys) has more than 561,000.
On Friday, Trump signed an executive order that gives TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, 90 days to sell off its U.S. operations. The Trump administration has claimed that the China-based company is a national security risk.
Another order, signed by Trump earlier in August, gave all U.S. companies 45 days to cut ties with ByteDance and its subsidiaries. And on top of the U.S. political action being taken against TikTok, Triller also sued TikTok over a patent dispute back in July.
Though TikTok is an extremely popular app that's been downloaded more than 2 billion times, on Aug. 3, Triller was the top free app download in the iOS App Store and is definitely starting to spark more interest. Though the purchase timeline and ultimate fate of TikTok remains unclear, Microsoft is in talks to buy the app from ByteDance, and has said that discussions to acquire are expected to wrap up by Sept. 15. Twitter has also shown some interest in buying TikTok, so I guess we'll just have to wait and see how it all works out.
You can learn more about what a potential TikTok ban in the U.S. would look like here.
Nicole is a Senior Editor at Mashable. She primarily covers entertainment and digital culture trends, and in her free time she can be found watching TV, sending voice notes, or going viral on Twitter for admiring knitwear. You can follow her on Twitter @nicolemichele5.
