Trump tried to ban TikTok, now he’s joined it: So what changed?

Donald Trump has joined social media platform TikTok after previously trying to get it banned on national security grounds.

The former president garnered over three million followers in just two days after joining the app on Saturday, posting a launch video on his account showing him greeting fans at an Ultimate Fighting Championship fight in Newark, New Jersey.

“It’s an honor,” he said in the video, which now has over 56 million views. The video ends with Trump telling the camera: “That was a good walk-on, right?”

His decision to join the platform has widely been regarded as an attempt to reach out to young Gen Z voters, with whom Joe Biden is leading by six points in a head-to-head matchup, as he makes his third bid for the White House.

But the move represents a major departure from Trump’s previous stance on the app.

What has Trump said in the past about TikTok?

“As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” then-president Trump declared to reporters aboard Air Force One in July 2020.

The very next month, Trump tried to ban TikTok through an executive order that said “the spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned” by Chinese companies was a national security threat. TikTok is owned by the China-based tech giant ByteDance.

“TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories,” the order read. “This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of