Biden campaign joins Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform

President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign launched its own account on former President Donald Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, on Monday, as first reported by Fox News. 

“Well. Let’s see how this goes. Converts welcome!” the campaign wrote in its first post to the platform on Monday under the handle @BidenHQ.

Speaking with Fox, the campaign said that it was joining the site in a bid to reach conservative voters and correct any “mis and disinformation” related to the president on the platform. So far, the campaign has posted several clips of GOP primary candidates like Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley attacking Trump on issues like the federal debt or his comments on the war in Israel.

Trump opted to start his own social media network after being kicked off Facebook and Twitter following the January 6th attack on the Capitol. For more than a year, Trump exclusively posted to his more than 6 million followers on Truth Social, even after Meta and X, formerly Twitter, reinstated his accounts last winter.

That changed in August after the former president was booked at an Atlanta jail on charges related to overturning his 2020 election defeat in Georgia. His mug shot was taken, and he posted the image to X shortly after.

“Crooked Joe Biden and his team are finally acknowledging that Truth Social is hot as a pistol and the only place where real news happens,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung told Fox on Monday. “Unfortunately for Biden, his continuation of spreading misinformation to gaslight the American people in order to distract from his disastrous record won’t work and they’ll be ratioed to oblivion.”

Trump reportedly signed an agreement to only post on Truth Social for an 18-month period that ended in June. Truth Social’s financial future is unclear. This month, Digital World Acquisition Corp., the SPAC (special purpose acquisition company) that was supposed to take the platform’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group, public said it was returning $533 million to investors. 

For many years, Democrats stayed away from trolling their Republican opponents online, opting for the Obama-era “when they go low, we go high,” strategy. But throughout the 2020 election, Democrats, like Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), started leveraging their online followings to post memes and make fun of their opponents. 

The Biden campaign’s decision to join Truth Social is an extension of this strategy. During the first GOP primary debate in August, the Biden campaign ran an ad campaign plastering the “Dark Brandon” meme on the Fox News website.