For the past month, TikTok has tried to assure business leaders, influencers, and Jewish organizations that it isn’t promoting anti-Israel or antisemitic speech on its platform. CEO Shou Chew has reportedly met with executives at Tinder, Facebook, and the Anti-Defamation League, among others, to discuss moderation and misinformation, while its head of operations held a private video call with more than a dozen Jewish TikTokers and celebrities, including Sacha Baron Cohen and Amy Schumer, during which Cohen accused the app of “creating the biggest antisemitic movement since the Nazis.”
The meetings came after weeks of accusations by lawmakers that TikTok was pushing pro-Palestine videos into users’ For You pages, quietly indoctrinating America’s young people against the state of Israel. TikTok has denied these claims, writing that the hashtag #standwithisrael had received 46 million views in the US between October 7 and 31, making it one and a half times more popular than the hashtag #standwithpalestine, which received 29 million views. Still, a group of mostly Republican Congress members who have long called for the US to ban TikTok have used the war to re-air their grudges against the app. “TikTok is a tool China uses to spread propaganda to Americans, now it’s being used to downplay Hamas terrorism,” wrote Senator Marco Rubio on X, formerly known as Twitter, in November.
To claim that TikTok is intentionally spoon-feeding pro-Palestine videos to young people is to misunderstand what TikTok is, who uses it, and what those people are already more likely to believe. Of TikTok’s estimated 80 million US monthly active users, about 60 percent are between the ages of 16 to 24, and another 26 percent are between 25 and 44. It is an app dominated by young people, and young people happen to sympathize with Palestine.
Before the Hamas attacks on October 7, Americans were already beginning to side more with the Palestinian cause, but this year…
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