At Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley reiterated her pledge to ban the Chinese social media platform TikTok in the United States, citing a statistic that the app makes people more antisemitic.
“We really do need to ban TikTok once and for all and let me tell you why. For every 30 minutes that someone watches TikTok, every day, they become 17% more antisemitic, more pro-Hamas based on doing that.”
Facts First: Haley’s campaign pointed CNN to a survey analysis published on X by a data scientist, which she misrepresented on the debate stage. Furthermore, the team that conducted the original survey told CNN it was never designed to support a claim like Haley’s.
How did Haley make such a claim? Blame it on a bad game of telephone.
The Haley campaign told CNN she was referring to a story from the New York Sun, which cites the analysis of a survey posted on X and Github last week.
The analysis was shared by Anthony Goldbloom, a data scientist who commissioned the survey from a data intelligence company called Generation Lab.
In a post on X, Goldbloom said the survey showed “spending at least 30 minutes a day on TikTok increases the chances a respondent holds antisemitic or anti-Israel views by 17%.”
But his analysis didn’t include the survey’s methodology, which would have explained how and when the data was collected and walked through how researchers analyzed it.
In an interview with CNN, Goldbloom said he thought it was “more transparent” to share the raw data and code rather than the methodology, noting that his code included the survey questions, but acknowledged it could be confusing for readers.
CNN obtained the survey and methodology from Generation Lab. The survey polled 1,532 Americans ages 18 to 29 over Thanksgiving…
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