While US President Donald Trump signed a new executive order against TikTok today, the man himself has reportedly decided to join a rival to the social media platform. That app is called Triller and to date, his account already has more than 3000 followers.
Evidence of President Trump’s Triller account was first picked up by WSJ journalist Taylor Lorenz, and from the looks of it, the account doesn’t have that many videos at the time of writing. Interestingly enough, however, the first video has already been viewed more than 590000 times; it is basically just a compilation of stock photos of the man with the audio clips of him saying “I’m a professional at technology” and “nobody can do it like me”. The last clip being repeated no less than three times.
Donald Trump has launched an official profile on TikTok competitor Triller https://t.co/n5g9YDXqnB pic.twitter.com/hcr7goziDO
— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) August 15, 2020
It’s not just his videos that are fast gaining traction either. Since the Trump administration issued its first executive order against ByteDance’s TikTok, Triller saw a surge of interest in the past month. With the app having been downloaded more than 700000 times.
Triller first made its debut back in 2015, nearly a year before TikTok came on to the scene. One possible reason the app never took in the same way as its rival, however, could be due to the fact that its creator once said that it’s viewed as the “adult version” of TikTok and catered to users who were a little bit more naughty.
As for TikTok, the app’s parent company has 90 days to sell off its US business, on top of destroying all collected data of US users. Microsoft has been confirmed as one of the app’s potential buyers – although its founder Bill Gates, has described the deal as a “poisoned chalice” – while Twitter is also another contender. On another note, ByteDance isn’t taking this executive order lying down and has already begun the procedures to challenge the Trump administration’s executive order in a US court of law.
(Source: Taylor Lorenz via Twitter, The Verge // Image: TechCrunch)
