The Pro-Israel Techies Who Got TikTok Banned
The US government is censoring TikTok because of Gaza, not China.
This week the DC Circuit Court of Appeals is hearing arguments over the TikTok ban passed earlier this year. My lawyer friends tell me that the case is likely to be decided on national security grounds rather than First Amendment considerations. These claims of national security are entirely notional; the government’s own filing shockingly acknowledges that they have “no information” that Chinese officials have manipulated the platform in the US. We are on the precipice of the largest removal of speech in our history, which would affect over half of Americans, on the basis of a purely hypothetical, peacetime threat to national security.
It’s incredible that First Amendment considerations may end up not mattering to the courts, but I think it is still important that the driving motivations for the ban be more widely understood, for my fellow, future historians if for no other reason. While reporting on the ban has tended to highlight concerns over data security, the effects of social media on children, and, especially, anti-Chinese hawkishness, these interests played important but supplementary roles. The driving factor that took the idea of a TikTok ban from failed proposal to blockbuster legislation in a matter of weeks was something else.
Remember, multiple prior efforts to ban TikTok had gone nowhere; by fall 2023, the buzz in DC was that any TikTok ban proposal would be in a holding pattern until after the 2024 election. That all changed after October 7th and the Hamas attack on Israel. In the aftermath, a group of influential pro-Israel activists from the US tech sector, angry over TikTok’s unwillingness to more rigorously censor pro-Palestinian content, began actively lobbying for a ban on the platform. In other words, TikTok became a target in a global (dis)information war over Gaza.
The result was perhaps the most sudden legislative triumph in recent political history, a bill that made it from unveiling to super-majority House vote in just eight days and to final Senate passage a month later! That is a blistering pace for this Congress, a product of the kind of backroom dealmaking that Matthew Yglesias has labeled “secret Congress.” Knowing the bill would be unpopular and provoke backlash, Congress moved quickly and largely concealed the process from the public, eg, holding no unclassified hearings showing any evidence of alleged harms.
Failure is an orphan, but success has many fathers. The success of the TikTok bill in Congress has spawned quite a few “how did it happen” retrospectives, several highlighting the role played by Palantir, the Peter Thiel-founded defense tech startup that is disrupting a hyper-consolidated and hidebound industry. Palantir stands to gain from an uptick in saber-rattling towards China, so it’s not surprising that they would be involved with a bill that could only heighten tension with China. The prime movers behind the ban bill from Palantir include CEO Alex Karp, his senior advisor Jacob Helberg, and bill co-sponsor (and future Palantir lobbyist) Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI).
But there is another significant player outside of Palantir whose role has gone mostly unnoticed: Australian tech investor Anthony Goldbloom. Goldbloom financed or disseminated a series of studies — the most successful from a small, for-hire shop in NJ — purporting to provide evidence that TikTok had been weaponized by Chinese government officials. I have written at length about how fundamentally flawed and misleading those studies are. Still, they were cited throughout the (brief) congressional discussion of the TikTok bill, and were also endlessly and credulously cited by otherwise liberal journalists and pundits.
These men and their associates played a vital, underrated role in the passage of the TikTok ban bill. Which means that their justifications for seeking a ban tell us something important about the law’s ultimate purpose. We should listen to them. And when you do, the key reasons given time and again had to do with the US public’s reaction to the conflict in Gaza.
In the short term, ban proponents sought to suppress pro-Palestinian content on the platform. In the longer term, their stated goal was to stymie the trend of young, college-age voters turning away from reflexive support of Israel. In other words, when ban proponents realized that they had failed to press their ideological case in the marketplace of opinion, they turned to government power to suppress those who disagreed with them.
I’ll show rather than tell. Below, I have created a timeline of representative public statements by these four men along with other pertinent posts. You can click through to the original sources for each statement.
October 10th, 2023. Anthony Goldbloom, who rarely posted on social media about politics previously, retweeted three posts discussing the atrocities committed by Hamas against Israelis on October 7th. Later posts detailed the antisemitism he and his family had experienced in the aftermath.
October 13th. Goldbloom retweeted a Squawk Box interview titled “Words and Ideas Matter: Fighting Antisemitism on Campus,” featuring Apollo Global CEO Marc Rowan calling for the resignation of UPenn executives for allowing a pro-Palestinian conference to happen on campus. Rowan: “Anti-semitism seems to have found a place of tolerance on the campus protected by free speech.”
October 19th. Harvard CAPS-Harris released a poll showing that 51% of those ages 18-24 believed that the October 7th massacre could “be justified by the grievance of Palestinians.”
October 26th. Tech investor Jeff Morris Jr. wrote a viral tweet thread, “The TikTok War: Why High School & College Kids Are Getting the Wrong Information about Hamas & Israel. I spent the weekend trying to reverse engineer the TikTok algorithm, as I am convinced this is the reason we’re losing the information war with high school & college students.” He also compared usage of pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian hashtags on TikTok.
Morris finished the thread by writing, “While we are spreading our perspectives on Twitter, we need to figure out a way to balance out the narrative on TikTok otherwise I worry we will fall too far behind with high school and college kids–and this is where they get their news. I’m still researching–and if anybody with a data background wants to join, please let me know. I have never been a ‘social media is bad’ person, but high school/college students are literally our future & we’re on the brink of a potential global war. So maybe this matters.”
October 31st. Goldbloom subtweeted Morris’s October 26th tweet, adding, “Like many others, I was shocked to see the results of the Harvard poll showing that 51% of 18-24 year-olds believe Hamas’s massacre of Israelis was justified. Motivated by this post, I sourced data on TikTok and Instagram Reels related to the war.”
In particular, Goldbloom was concerned about anti-Israel opinion on college campuses. “There’s a lot of angst about coverage from the BBC and NYTimes. But we need to be paying more attention to what’s happening on social media. It attracts over an order of magnitude more engagement. And could be what’s undermining the safety of Jews on college campuses.”
The rest of Goldbloom’s thread traced the popularity of anti-Israel posts on Instagram and TikTok, crediting “an anonymous source for providing me with TikTok and Instagram data” and promising more to come.
November 4th. Rep. Mike Gallagher, speaking for the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party’s twitter account: “How are so many young people in America siding with Hamas terrorists? … Where are they getting their news? The answer, increasingly, is TikTok – an app under the de facto control of the Chinese Communist Party.”
10 November. Al Jazeera reported that Senators Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio and Representative Mike Gallagher called for a TikTok ban because of the proliferation of anti-Israel content on the platform.
Hawley, citing unnamed analysts (although Morris Jr.’s tweet is mentioned later in the article): “While data security issues are paramount, less often discussed is TikTok’s power to radically distort the world picture that America’s young people encounter. Israel’s unfolding war with Hamas is a crucial test case.”
Rubio: TikTok had become “cesspools of [pro-Hamas] misinformation and indoctrination” that were “brainwashing” American youth.
November, date uncertain. Forty corporate executives, many from the tech sector, met with TikTok CEO Shou Chew to complain about the amount of pro-Palestinian content on the platform. The most vocal member of the group was Anthony Goldbloom, who accused TikTok of promoting antisemitism. He offered as proof the claim that for every view of pro-Israel videos on TikTok there were 54 views for pro-Palestinian videos, brainwashing American youth into hating Israel. However, TikTok was unwilling to adjust its algorithm, and the marketing campaign it launched in December titled “Swipe Out Hate” was too little and too late to assuage Goldbloom.
November 30th. Goldbloom wrote a viral tweet thread alleging to show a correlation between the amount of TikTok usage and the likelihood of users holding antisemitic or anti-Israel views. “It’s no wonder there’s been a 10x increase in antisemitic incidents on college campuses compared with a year ago.”
December 1st. Palantir CEO Alex Karp spoke at the Reagan National Defense Forum. Karp says it was October 7th that woke him up to the fact “we have a huge problem in the western world with anti-semitism.” As a result, young Americans at elite schools “are breathing the vapors of a dangerous new fake and self-destructive religion” while “sitting at your elite school pretending because you watched TikTok twice and got an A-plus on some crazy paper because your professor couldn’t get a job anywhere else, that you actually understand the world.”
He said that Palantir will not hire these protestors in the future, and a few days later promises to set aside 180 undefined positions at Palantir for students fleeing university antisemitism, saying, “We must do better in the battlefield of ideas. … This new, thin and highly destructive religion whose vapors are being inhaled and kept in the lungs of our young elite students are dangerous to the world and dangerous to our society.”
December 7th. Semafor investigates Goldbloom’s claims in his viral tweet thread of November 30th. The data came from a group called Generation Lab that was hired by Goldbloom to conduct polling on sub-30 year olds’ use of social media and their antisemitic views. However, Generation Lab distanced itself from Goldbloom’s analysis of the data; and when Semafor looked at the data, they concluded that it did “not fully support the strong claims” made by Goldbloom. Goldbloom subsequently admitted, “I certainly didn’t want to cherry pick; it’s easy to create a sensational headline picking the most sensational questions…But maybe it was a bit of a mistake to group [Israel and Jewish people]” when assessing antisemitism. Indeed, Semafor’s ran its own analysis of the data and found that antisemitism was more strongly correlated with those using X or Threads than those on TikTok.
December 8th. The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), run by former Anti-Defamation League researcher Joel Finkelstein, issues their report, “A Tik-Tok-ing Timebomb.”
December 21st. Goldbloom is interviewed for a Substack post, “The Great TikTok Pogrom of ‘23.” Both the host, ex-WSJ journalist Amir Mizroch, and Goldbloom are particularly concerned with the longer-term implications of allowing TikTok to negatively influence a future generation of young people who might otherwise be sympathetic to Israel.
Mizroch: “Anthony, the thing I guess that worries me on many levels, but also as an Israeli, is, when we talk about TikTok, we're talking about young people. When these young people in the next 10, 20 years, when they get into Congress, what does that mean? What does that mean for America? What does that mean for us, for Israelis? Who's the next Democratic president in 8 years, 12 years, going to be a person who got their views about this conflict on TikTok?”
Goldbloom: “Some people quibble with some coverage from the New York Times or CNN or the BBC. But to the extent that you quibble with the coverage on those platforms and it bothers you, I think what's going on on TikTok might be a little bit less visible but, in my view, much more of a significant issue as far as, as you said earlier, shaping the views of the people who will be the elected officials and people in power in the next generation.”
January 9th. Alex Karp flies the Palantir company board to Israel to try to push tech executives to more publicly support Israel. The goal is to “embarrass other people who are pro-Israel in private but somehow not in public.”
March 5th. The TikTok divestment / ban bill is introduced, passes unanimously in committee on March 8th, and passes the full House on March 13th.
March 13th. On the Palantir quarterly earnings call, Karp says he is “exceedingly proud that after Oct. 7, within weeks, we are on the ground and we are involved in operationally crucial operations in Israel,” which may include providing the artificial intelligence tools used for targeting strikes in Gaza.
Jacob Helberg, husband of anti-TikTok VC investor Keith Rabois, lists House members who voted against TikTok ban bill to try to fundraise for their opponents in November, specifically directing donors to Alberto Martinez, who works for Meta-financed lobbyist Targeted Victory (which had spearheaded prior efforts to pass anti-TikTok bills).
April 24th. The TikTok divestment / ban bill passes the Senate after being packaged in with Ukraine/Israel military aid.
May 1st. Karp attends a Capitol Hill forum organized by bill organizer Jacob Helberg, where Karp excoriated anti-Israel campus protests. “Look at Columbia. There is literally no way to explain the investment in our elite schools, and the output is a pagan religion – a pagan religion of mediocrity, and discrimination, and intolerance, and violence. … An architecture of anti-discrimination while dressing in masks and excluding the population that’s been most discriminated against for the last 3,000 years.”
May 4th. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), a cosponsor of the TikTok ban bill: “I don’t think there’s any question that there has been a coordinated effort off these college campuses, and that you have outside paid agitators and activists. It also highlights exactly why we included the TikTok bill in the foreign supplemental aid package because you’re seeing how these kids are being manipulated by certain groups or entities or countries to foment hate on their behalf and really create a hostile environment here in the US.”
May 8th. Karp speaks at the Ash Carter Exchange at an event with retired US General Mark Milley. “We kinda just think these things that are happening across college campuses are a sideshow. No, they are the show. Because if we lose the intellectual debate you will not be able to deploy any army in the West ever.”
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Conclusion. What emerges from that timeline is a very clear sense that a primary motivation for multiple key backers of the TikTok ban bill was the desire to mitigate the spread of pro-Palestinian content among young Americans. Which means the courts may be about to put their stamp of approval on a law that is not only censorial in effect but in intent as well.
This is a profoundly disturbing story. A small group of wealthy tech investors financed or spread disinformation about TikTok because the platform didn’t actively take their side in the information war over a foreign conflict. They’ve openly stated that their goal is throttling the flow of information to the public. They turned to “secret Congress” to ram through a bill in order to avoid public scrutiny and accountability. They would compel the largest removal of speech in US history despite providing no actual evidence of wrongdoing. And they might just get away with it.