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“Dark Brandon” memes on Biden’s TikTok account
Photo: TikTok
On Monday night, Joe Biden's campaign team posted a video on TikTok for the first time in the US President's name. In the 30-second clip, an employee asks the 81-year-old questions about the Super Bowl, the most important sporting event in the USA. The head of government answers well and, above all, diplomatically.
So he doesn't side with one of the two teams in the final of the National Football League (NFL), i.e. the Kansas City Chiefs or the San Francisco 49ers. Instead, he takes refuge in saying that he has to support the Philadelphia Eagles for his wife's sake: "My wife is a Philly girl." He responds to the final question - "Trump or Biden?" - with the counter question: "Are you kidding ?”.
Banned on work cell phones
Until recently, people would probably have responded with the same question if someone had said that Joe Biden was on TikTok. The US President is not considered to have a particularly positive attitude towards the platform.
TikTok is one of the few online platforms that are successful in the West that do not come from the USA. There is concern, especially there, but also in Europe, that information about users could end up with Chinese authorities via the app, for example in the course of data queries. Governments of several countries and the EU Commission have therefore already banned the use of TikTok on work cell phones.
In the USA, TikTok is now banned on government smartphones in more than half of the US states. Biden's administration has banned the nearly four million federal government employees from using TikTok on their work cell phones. Exceptions are granted only for law enforcement, national security, and security research purposes.
Biden as “Dark Brandon”
Joe Biden's campaign team apparently still sees TikTok as an important tool for reaching young voters in particular before the presidential election on November 5th. The platform has long since overtaken other large platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook in terms of regular usage times. TikTok has more than a billion users worldwide.
The first post from Biden's TikTok account is titled with a flippant "lol hey guys"; the profile picture used is a picture that has been circulating on the Internet for some time as "Dark Brandon" and shows Joe Biden with red laser eyes. The slogan originally used by Trump supporters against Biden has been parodied by Biden's team since 2022 and also appears as a short clip of just a few seconds in Biden's first TikTok video. Biden's team posted the photo montage on
mak/AFP