Not Grok TikTok
Do kids on TikTok really admire Osama bin Laden?
Last week, Twitter lit up with breathless claims about the appearance of “thousands” of TikTok videos praising Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America,” in which the terrorist leader attempted to justify the 9/11 attacks. The idea that America’s youth were blithely swallowing terrorist propaganda led to renewed calls for a ban on TikTok.
But as others have noted, these claims were ill-founded. The supercut of TikTok videos that went viral on Twitter was posted by a controversial muckraking journalist. When
dug into the given numbers, he found that a relatively small number of low-follower accounts in the wellness space had posted videos with the controversial hashtag, and only a handful did so in an affirmative way.The Washington Post tallied up just 274 videos with 1.8 million total views over the prior week. For those who are unfamiliar with TikTok, these are entirely pedestrian numbers. I myself have made multiple videos that have passed 2 million views each. By contrast, top hashtags attract orders of magnitude more attention, like #skincare gaining 252 million views in a single day. That is what true hashtag virality looks like on TikTok.
These kind of public overreactions can quickly backfire. When The Guardian took down its copy of bin Laden’s letter, it provided oxygen for conspiracists who could then point to the removal as proof of some kind of coverup. It’s the Streisand Effect, global jihad edition.
Worse, reacting to elder moral panic by blocking all videos with the hashtag is a missed learning opportunity. Bear in mind that much of Gen Z doesn’t remember 9/11, or a time before the global war on terror, or the pre-2008 peak of the anti-war movement, and so on. The fact that bin Laden’s ultimately tired and self-serving argument sounds fresh to young leftist influencers is a sign of our educational failure. But simply removing the letter also removes the chance to highlight the durability of anti-Semitic rhetoric among Islamic fundamentalists. It seems likely that bin Laden’s letter popped up on leftist TikTok at this particular moment because his rhetoric about Palestine echoes that of Hamas supporters, including a reference to the genocidal euphemism of freeing Palestine “from the river to the sea.” That’s pretty damn pertinent right now! It’s not hard to imagine how this could be a useful comparison to draw for pro-Israeli accounts.
Ultimately, this is yet another instance of a Twitter mountain being fashioned out of a TikTok molehill. I previously covered a similar case featuring a supposedly viral Taco Bell video that was actually a Twitter goldbug grift stacked on top of a TikTok stunt. (Say that ten times fast!)
These hyperbolic reactions keep happening because of the immense generational divide between TikTok users and those with institutional power. It takes time to rise through the editorial pipeline at the newsroom or within the halls of a gerontocratic government. But the elder Millennials, Gen X, and Boomers who run our national institutions simply do not use TikTok at the same rate as younger Millennials and Gen Z.
That which we don’t understand, we are quick to fear and ready to destroy. If you’re a TikTok non-user, it is deeply alienating to realize that over 150 million fellow Americans — perhaps including your own children or grandchildren!—use TikTok to discuss topics that make you deeply uncomfortable, or even see it as an alternative to the traditional news gathering organizations that you trust. And this giant entity operates according to an impersonal algorithm — which is a word you struggle to pronounce let alone understand — that belongs to a company headquartered in communist China. Hey, when you were a kid, you saw the original Manchurian Candidate at the movies! Thems the baddies!
That combination of ignorance and paranoia makes policymakers and journalists easy targets for entrepreneurs who can extract personal or political advantage through hyperbolic attacks on TikTok. Here are two recent examples from the blowup two weeks ago over what critics perceived as a relatively pro-Palestinian bent on TikTok. I say “relatively” because it’s not immediately obvious that the ratio of pro-Israel vs pro-Palestinian TikToks is out of proportion to the mixed views of young people on the conflict. They’re in general more likely to be critical of Israel than their elders (which was true prior to the existence of TikTok).
But that didn’t stop Representative Mike Gallagher from penning an op-ed implicitly accusing the Communist Party of China of gaming the algorithm in favor of the Palestinians. In the essay, he falls prey to the classic fallacy of the motivated TikTok critic: the fact that the CCP could interfere with the TikTok algorithm in America is taken as proof that the CCP has already interfered with the algorithm. He otherwise offers no evidence that they have done so.
But such niceties as offering evidence are optional for a China hawk like Gallagher, who has been banging the drum for war readiness against China for years. If you believe, as Gallagher does, that a World War Three level conflict against China is imminent, then taking out TikTok is a smart, preemptive strike on the Chinese economy and global influence.
If, on the other hand, you believe that the actions of China hawks are a self-fulfilling prophecy that could lead us into an unnecessary conflict with China, then maintaining economic relationships with Chinese companies like TikTok is a means of disincentivizing warmongering by political actors on either side of the Pacific. To put it in practical terms, a TikTok ban would remove a nearly quarter of a trillion dollar penalty on China were it to start a war.
All of this to say, Gallagher has strong ideological priors about China generally that drive his specific antipathy towards TikTok. If you don’t share those priors, then you should proportionately downgrade your estimation of his opinion in regards to TikTok.
Consider another more recent critic of the platform, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman. Earlier this month, Ackman tweeted that TikTok should “probably be banned” for “massively manipulating public opinion” on Hamas and Israel. He further called on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to “fix the algorithms so that we are able to find common ground” and steer humanity away from the “rapid path to oblivion.”
It’s who Ackman doesn’t mention in that list of bad social media actors that is interesting: Google. For the last several years, disinformation researchers have often — mistakenly in my opinion — blamed the search engine and its subsidiary Youtube for radicalizing America’s youth towards extreme ideologies and dangerous behaviors. One could just as well criticize — also mistakenly in my opinion — Youtube’s failure to remove all pro-Hamas content.
But now take a look at which companies Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management fund holds equity in. They recently bought shares of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, which are now worth $1.8 billion and comprise the fund’s single largest investment. Were TikTok to be banned, Google would be the major beneficiary as TikTok’s largest competitor for digital advertising revenue. Those controlling meaningful equity in the search engine would stand to benefit from any consequent surge in Alphabet’s stock price.
As far as I can tell, Ackman has had relatively little to publicly say about TikTok prior to Pershing placing a billion dollar bet on TikTok’s main competitor. Indeed, what he did say could even be interpreted as mildly positive towards the platform.
None of this is to suggest that Gallagher, Ackman, or any other skeptic of TikTok is insincere. But it is a reminder that those calling for a ban on TikTok often have major personal and political incentives for doing so. It is in their interest to exaggerate TikTok’s failings, to provoke public paranoia, and to spark Congressional or reportorial hysteria. Keep that in mind during the next, inevitable Twitter blowup over whatever the kids are up to on TikTok.