Social media is playing a dangerous role in the malevolent spread of Jew-hatred, propaganda, and disinformation about the Israel-Hamas war.

One platform in particular — TikTok — poses an existential threat to political discourse in the United States. We should follow the lead of other nations in banning TikTok or requiring ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, to sell off its interests in the platform.

China, along with Iran and Russia, all back Hamas and have played a key role in an influence campaign aimed at undercutting Israel and the United States through a deluge of overt and covert disinformation campaigns according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Connecting the dots, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) has asserted that, “TikTok is attempting to shape the opinions of its users against Israel because leveraging the Palestinian cause to weaken Israel is in the interest of Communist China.”

TikTok’s undue influence, particularly on young Americans, cannot be overstated. TikTok has more than 1 billion users globally and 150 million in the United States. That’s a significant reach for a Chinese company, especially because the social media app doesn’t even exist in its own country and is banned in India; the two most populous countries in the world.

Look no further than the recirculation of mass murderer Osama bin Laden’s famous incendiary, antisemitic “Letter to America,” following the September 11, 2001 attacks, which killed 3,000 Americans. Positive responses to the letter went viral this week on TikTok. In thousands of short video posts, people claimed bin Laden’s words opened their eyes to the need for terrorism in response to colonialism.

TikTok put out a statement saying “Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism. We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform. The number of videos on TikTok is small and reports of it trending on our platform are inaccurate. This is not unique to TikTok and has appeared across multiple platforms and the media.”

Half of TikTok’s users are under the age of 25 and is the top search engine for Gen Z where a third of its users get their news. It is worth noting that a bipartisan coalition of 45 state attorneys general is investigating whether TikTok’s design and practices have caused or exacerbated mental and physical health issues among teens and children.

Almost immediately after Hamas fired thousands of missiles and sent terrorists into Israel on October 7th to rape, torture, and murder 1,200 innocent people and kidnap another 240 hostages, including 32 children between the ages of 9 months and 18 years old, TikTok became the major source of disinformation on the conflict for millions of young Americans. And, according to its own data analyzed by Axios, TikTok has had a disproportionate amount of anti-Israel content on the app and others have asserted that it is amplifying pro-Palestine viewpoints.

A group of well-known Jewish TikTok content creators sent a “Dear TikTok” letter accusing the app of placing them in “digital and physical danger.” The letter cites the rampant misinformation about the war, how content creators could easily bypass safety features, and called on TikTok to step up its systems for safety and moderation.

“The daily reality for Jewish content creators on TikTok includes death threats, endless threatening comments on posts (many just for being Jewish), and a barrage of harassment in all forms of TikTok-facilitated interaction. And that was true before the massacres of Jews on October 7th. Since then, the hate directed at Jewish content creators has been compounded to unimaginable degrees. It’s relentless and, worst of all, it’s largely permitted.”  Anger fueled by TikTok “has led to antisemitic harassment, assault and vandalism”.

Just last week, a pro-Palestinian protester killed a Jewish man in Los Angeles. Yet, as Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) stated, “the national outcry over antisemitism within the pro-Palestinian movement appears muted if not nonexistent.”

TikTok has become a cesspool of Jew hatred and its own data shows the disproportionate amount of pro-palestinian content circulating. Polling data shows that it is playing a key role in targeting our youth into sympathizing with Hamas. While Israel receives overwhelming support from Americans, the same cannot be said about young Americans.  An October 19 poll from Harvard CAPS/HAarris found that a whopping 51% of people 19 to 24 years old believed that Hamas’ October 7th massacre was justified by the “grievances of Palestinians”.

Let that shocking statistic sink in. Clearly, the attacks on the Jewish community at universities and on the streets of America are a predictable outcome of this tsunami of online hate.

TikTok claims that it doesn’t allow terrorist content on the platform. However, earlier this year, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue analyzed how TikTok continued to allow the Islamic State, a terrorist organization, to proliferate obvious terrorist content without consequence and that their ability to do so was getting more sophisticated in working around TikTok’s automated content moderation efforts. The report concluded that this posed “a potentially serious national security risk to the United States.”

Concerns over TikTok aren’t new and it’s a bipartisan issue. Multiple states and members of Congress have long called for bans due to national security and data privacy concerns. Last December President Joe Biden signed the No TikTok on Government Devices Act, prohibiting the use of the app on devices owned by the federal government. At least 32 states have followed suit banning TikTok from government-issued devices. Numerous countries have followed suit.

Biden met with President Xi Jinping on Wednesday in an effort to “manage competition responsibly to prevent it from veering into conflict, confrontation, or a new Cold War.” TikTok was not among the subjects discussed as listed by the White House. High-level security issues and growing conflict dominated the discussion with some middle-ground consensus on illicit drugs and climate change.

Back in February, Sen. Michael Bennet called on Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores immediately given its unacceptable risk to national security.

Bennet pointed out the risk that, “the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) could weaponize TikTok against the United States, specifically, by forcing ByteDance to surrender Americans’ sensitive data or manipulate the content Americans receive to advance China’s interests,” something the Chinese Communist Party can require ByteDance to do. Bennet further wrote that, “no company subject to CCP dictates should have the power to accumulate such extensive data on the American people or curate content to nearly a third of our population.”

We should all be concerned as the implications go far beyond the Israel-Hamas war.  Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) introduced legislation to ban the app and has said, “a regime that hates America controls TikTok’s algorithm and knows how to use it to divide and demoralize Americans…What we’re seeing right now is a real-life demonstration of that capability.”

Do you think for one second the Chinese would allow an American-owned company tied to our government to operate this way in China?

Of course not, and neither should we.

Doug Friednash grew up in Denver and is a partner with the law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber and Schreck. He is the former chief of staff for Gov. John Hickenlooper.

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