President Biden, White House Launch Threads Accounts

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President Joe Biden and the White House are expanding their social media outreach by launching accounts on the Threads platform.

According to reports, President Joe Biden and his presidential campaign have opened Threads accounts. Threads is the Meta-backed platform launched by Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg to rival X, formerly Twitter which was acquired by tech billionaire Elon Musk. They will join the White House, which has already launched an account on Threads.

President Biden shared the news ironically through a post made to X on his birthday, which was Monday (November 20). In his first post at Threads, he wrote: “I turned 81 and all I got was a new social platform! Thanks for the well wishes, folks. And to the workers at the birthday candle factory, I hope your union got you overtime.”

Additionally, First Lady Jill Biden will also have a Threads account along with Vice President Kamala Harris (who’ll have her own campaign Threads account) and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff. Sources close to the decision state that these developments wouldn’t have any effect on the administration’s current usage of their accounts on X and that the decision to create Threads accounts was based on the metrics of usage the platform has.

The move is a prudent one as The White House gained an influx of followers when it launched its Threads account during the summer as many began to migrate away from X in the wake of several changes that Musk made to the platform. The news also comes days after the White House condemned an antisemitic post that Musk endorsed and amplified on X last week.

Other companies such as IBM, Apple, and Warner Bros. Discovery have announced that they would be pausing ads on the X platform after the Media Matters article showing how these and other brands had their ads run in proximity to posts created by Neo-Nazis. Musk has denied being antisemitic, vowing to sue Media Matters for their article exposing those issues.