WASHINGTON – Two weeks out from the Nov 8 midterms, President Joe Biden sat for an interview – not with a broadcast news anchor or major newspaper, but a panel of six young activists organised by NowThis News.

As the conversation aired on the network’s YouTube channel that night, the count of live viewers hovered at about 6,000.

But the live coverage wasn’t the point.

The interview was intended as a back door for the White House into one of the fastest-growing social media platforms for politics and news, one the White House can’t access directly itself: TikTok.

The rapidly expanding video-sharing platform has become increasingly pivotal to reaching young voters, particularly as legacy social media networks like Facebook and Twitter publicly falter.

But TikTok’s aggressive harvesting of user data – and suspicions of its Chinese parent company ByteDance – have fuelled bipartisan alarm about the amount of information on United States users that may be funnelled to Beijing.

By having the president appear on NowThis, the White House could be certain that clips from the event would be posted to the channel’s millions of TikTok followers, amplifying the appearance many times over without putting the president directly on the social media platform.

The engagement betrays a simple calculation within the West Wing: TikTok is too important to ignore.

One in 10 Americans and more than a quarter of adults between the ages of 18 and 29 say they “regularly get news from TikTok” according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Centre. 

More importantly, TikTok and Instagram – which has adopted some of TikTok’s most popular features – are the only two major social networks with increasing levels of news consumption. Users of Twitter., Facebook, LinkedIn, and Reddit all report consuming less news through those services over the past two years.

“The reality is that there’s a significant amount of people who are getting their news there – we can’t unilaterally disarm,” said Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital strategy. “So it’s important to make sure that we’re engaging there.”

TikTok prohibited

But that can be difficult when your interactions with the platform are handcuffed amid a multi-year national security review. 

The White House is among a slew of federal entities – including the State Department, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, and Transportation Security Administration – that do not allow TikTok to be installed on government-issued devices.

Biden administration officials are attempting to broker an agreement with TikTok that would allow the video-sharing site to keep operating in the US by enacting additional restrictions on how US user data is stored, according to people familiar with the discussions who requested not to be identified discussing a national security matter.

But the effort has stalled over concerns the app would still remain a threat, and Congress is weighing legislation that would officially ban TikTok from all government phones.

For now, there’s no official White House account on the social media network, and Mr Biden’s digital strategy team has no relationship with the content team at TikTok in the way it does with other leading social media sites.

To monitor emerging trends on the platform, Mr Flaherty occasionally uses an old, personal iPod Touch device that can access the service without putting White House data at risk.

Instead of generating its own TikTok content, the White House has targeted creators on the platform who then post their own videos.

“We have to focus on reaching people where they are, so we built out a digital partnerships team that makes us the first White House to have dedicated staff for digital creators,” Mr Flaherty said. “Some of them focus on political creators – folks who primarily make political content. Others focus on what we call ‘audience creators’ – people who have reach into target audiences that we need to talk to.” BLOOMBERG