This week, videos featuring former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s 2002 missive “Letter to America” were posted to TikTok, leading a wide swath of politicians, families of 9/11 victims, and influencers to condemn users creating the clips — and the app itself.
The story goes like this: TikTokers are “going viral” for sharing bin Laden’s arguments, and that is renewing calls to ban the app and feeding a recent fear that TikTok is indoctrinating Gen Z with pro-Hamas propaganda. The issue is, that story’s not fully true. While some TikTokers really were posting videos urging others to read the letter and getting modest views, these videos only made up a “tiny, tiny corner” of TikTok, as Jason Koebler, one of the earlier reporters to dig into the videos, explained in a post on X.
The controversy over the videos is a reminder that, often, a moral panic stems from a kernel of truth, one that is removed from its original context and coated in hyperbole. The panic over the letter is just the latest in a long line of these sorts of social media-driven scares about the dangers of the internet, which tended to create a false sense of frenzy. Did any children at all film themselves eating Tide Pods for views? Sure. Was it a wildly popular trend among Gen Z teens back in the day? No. The same goes for last year’s panic about kids baking NyQuil in chicken in order to go viral on TikTok.
What makes this TikTok panic especially potent, however, is a mix of factors. There’s bipartisan support among US politicians to restrict or ban TikTok as a national security risk. In a hearing earlier this year, lawmakers grilled TikTok CEO Shou Chew over the app’s ties to China (TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is a Chinese company). And although TikTok says that the average age of its 150 million active users in the US is 31, the platform retains a deep association with youth culture. This makes it the ideal breeding ground for anxiety about what The…
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