Barack Obama teams up with TikTok influencers for Vote Registration Day

Former President Obama is reportedly planning to appear on TikTok to encourage voter registration.

As Axios reports, President Obama conducted a series of interviews for TikTok with 25-year-old TikTok influencer and nonprofit president Carlos Espina, as part of the Democratic Party's broader effort to reach some 30 million potential voters through non-traditional means on National Voter Registration Day.

Espina, who has 10.5 million followers on the Chinese-owned platform, has appeared on the app in recent months alongside President Biden and Vice President Harris. President Obama has been trying to leverage the traditional Democratic advantage among younger Americans under the age of 30 to favor Harris by encouraging TikTok viewers to visit IWillVote.com to register and make plans for Election Day.

The Harris-Waltz campaign also plans to target younger Americans with voter registration drives online and on campuses in key battleground states on National Voter Registration Day, Axios reported.

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The Biden and Harris campaigns have previously called on Obama to help raise money from wealthy donors and small-donor party activists. The Harris campaign also removed a segment from Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention in which he made a suggestive hand gesture while discussing former President Trump's “crowd size” and used it in a recent campaign video.

The voter registration push came a day after TikTok's lawyers faced off against the US government in federal court in Washington, DC, arguing that laws that could ban the platform within months are unconstitutional, while the Justice Department said the app needed to clear up national security risks.

Lawyers and content creators on both sides were forced to argue for and against the legislation, which would see TikTok and its China-based parent company ByteDance lose one of the world's largest markets if they do not cut ties by mid-January.

The TikTok building in Culver City, California on March 17, 2023. (AP Photo/Damien Dvarganes, File)

President Biden signed the bill in April, the culmination of a years-long battle in Washington over the short-video sharing app, which the U.S. government says collects vast amounts of user data, including sensitive information about viewing habits, that could fall into the hands of the Chinese government.

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Officials also warned that the app's proprietary algorithms that determine what users see are vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, who could use them to shape content in ways that are hard to detect.

Barack Obama speaks during the Democratic National Convention (DNC) at the United Center on Tuesday, August 20, 2024 in Chicago, Illinois. (Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

President Trump, who first raised national security concerns about TikTok in 2020, warned allies in March that banning TikTok now would benefit Meta-owned Facebook, which Trump has argued is hurting his 2020 reelection.

The Biden campaign joined TikTok in February with a Super Bowl-themed video, and after Biden ended his reelection campaign in July, Harris said in a TikTok post that she “thought I'd come here too.”

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President Trump joined TikTok in June with a video of him waving to fans at an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fight in Newark, New Jersey. UFC CEO Dana White announced, “The President is on TikTok,” to which Trump replied, “It's an honor,” as Kid Rock's song “American Bad Ass” played.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.