The former Digital Organizing Platforms Director for Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign is now a Global Program Manager for TikTok responsible for leading the app’s efforts to censor “misinformation” and address election-related content.
The former Biden campaign aide’s unearthed ties to the controversial, Chinese Communist Party-controlled app comes amidst renewed calls to ban it in the U.S.
Vishal Disawar, who is the Global Program Manager of Integrity Products at TikTok, worked for the Biden campaign from August to November 2020.
“Led the nation-wide product strategy and technical program management for voter outreach and improving volunteer + voter experiences on campaign tech platforms across 5 product teams and 7 program teams,” explains his LinkedIn profile.
Disawar lists additional ways he helped Biden’s campaign efforts including:
- Prioritized + scoped improvements and developed strategic implementation guidance for volunteer-facing products involved in voter outreach to enable the campaign to make 332M calls on ThruTalk, send 334M texts on ThruText, and have 200K volunteer-to-friend conversations via the Vote Joe mobile app.
- Drove process improvements to handle product feedback and roll-outs across 17 battleground state program teams.
- Led the joebiden.com website growth strategy for voter engagement to drive 19K voter registration & vote by mail registration conversions, and 30K polling location lookups in battleground states.
- Expanded voter outreach by an additional 247K conversations over a $2M spend in the final 3 weeks by managing a chatbot-based advertising program.
Disawar appeared to leverage his experience and connections working on the Biden campaign to join TikTok in March 2022.
“” explains a summary of his role on his LinkedIn profile.
The former Harris aide’s TikTok connections follow evidence revealing that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance employs former Chinese Communist Party officials, including individuals with military ties, to leadership roles and grants party members preferential treatment in its hiring process.
The app's founder and former CEO of its parent company has also pledged to use the company to "promote socialist core values" and devotion to the Chinese Communist Party in a 2018 statement.
TikTok's threat to national security and data privacy prompted the Trump administration to attempt to ban the platform from operating in the U.S., which was quashed by the Biden White House.
Beyond demonstrating close ties between the app and Democratic lawmakers, which decreases the likelihood of a TikTok ban in the U.S., it also calls into question the potential partisanship fueling the social media platform’s misinformation policies.
