Joe Biden

Biden’s 2023 AI executive order became a defining policy marker, then a central target of Trump’s 2025 deregulatory reversal.

Who they are

Joe Biden appears in this coverage principally as the U.S. president whose administration set technology, competition, privacy, cybersecurity and platform-policy agendas. Stories connect him to the White House, federal regulators and companies including Meta, TikTok, Google and Apple, as well as to the political contrast with Donald Trump.

The recent arc

Recent coverage peaked in 2024Q2, while the larger recent transition is from Biden-era policymaking to coverage of its aftermath under Trump. The core policy record includes Biden’s 2023 generative-AI executive order, which directed NIST and DHS work on safety, privacy and labor protections; his Privacy Shield 2.0 order; antitrust pressure that contextualized the DOJ’s Live Nation case; and planned cybersecurity requirements for government monitoring, procurement, AI use and foreign-hacker penalties.

Since 2025, Biden is more often the reference point for reversals, disputes and policy inheritance. Reuters reported that Trump revoked the 2023 AI order, while coverage of TikTok focuses on how Trump used the law Biden signed or faced, and the SEC rescinded rules proposed during the Biden administration. The most recent Venmo stories invoke the 2021 discovery of Biden’s account as context for the service’s default privacy change, illustrating how his presence has shifted from active decision-maker to a marker of earlier policy and privacy debates.

The tension

The central tension is between Biden’s use of executive and regulatory power to impose guardrails on technology markets and platforms, and a subsequent Trump-led rollback or repurposing of that framework. That conflict runs through AI policy, crypto enforcement, TikTok, federal technology governance and competition policy; it also intersects with platform accountability, as Biden criticized Meta’s decision to end third-party fact-checking in the U.S. and had earlier revoked Trump-era TikTok and WeChat bans for review.

Why it matters

Biden’s coverage maps how much U.S. technology policy can be established through executive action and agency rulemaking, but also how exposed that approach is to a change in administration. If the rollback pattern continues, companies and regulators will contend not only with changing compliance expectations in AI, crypto, privacy and procurement, but with the possibility that Biden-era measures remain politically salient even when they are no longer operative.

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