TikTok, China, and Bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’

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TikTok, China, and Bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’

TikTok's proliferation of anti-Israel content during the Israel-Hamas conflict has reignited debates about its legality in the U.S. At The National Interest, Jacob Helberg wrote about how lawmakers, including Mike Gallagher and Marco Rubio, expressing concerns about TikTok being a potential avenue for Chinese propaganda, impacting American security interests. He criticized TikTok’s algorithm for promoting fringe views and calls for legislative restrictions on Chinese social media apps, citing TikTok as a clear national security threat due to potential Chinese government influence and data access.

More from Helberg:

Just in the last few days, Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” went viral and surfaced videos with over 14.2 million views. At a time when the United States seeks to support its ally Israel, an analysis of the two most commonly used hashtags related to the war shows that 96.5 percent of the Israel content that TikTok displays to users is #FreePalestine content compared to 3.5 percent for #StandWithIsrael, according to TikTok’s own data. As Hollywood celebrity Sasha Baron Cohen recently decried: “What is happening at TikTok is it is creating the biggest antisemitic movement since the Nazis.”

No matter the topic, TikTok is invariably skewed against American security interests, consistently mirroring CCP talking points while promoting self-destructive behaviors among America’s youth. Other reports have found TikTok censoring and suppressing content about Xinjiang, Tibet, Tiananmen Square, and other topics deemed sensitive by the CCP. While at the same time, TikTok promotes “chroming” (sniffing glue) and the “blackout challenge” in America, the Chinese version of the app, Chairman Gallagher notes, “shows kids science experiments and other educational content.” This should not come as a surprise: TikTok is ultimately answerable to its parent company’s chief editor, Zhang Fuping, who is also the boss of that company’s internal Communist Party committee. 
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Chinese law enforcement agencies were also found recently carrying out a massive influence campaign targeting more than fifty online platforms—including Meta, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, as well as TikTok. The promoted content included criticisms of the United States and positive commentary on China’s governance of Xinjiang, among other issues related to Beijing’s political agenda. These efforts are all part of a broader multibillion-dollar information operation to harass critics, including Americans, and shape the global information environment.

Far from being a “public square” that promotes free speech, TikTok is more analogous to a “megaphone for the CCP.” Decades ago, these same national security concerns over the influence of foreign adversarial governments in American media stations prompted the U.S. government to restrict foreign ownership of television and radio. Today, social media arguably has far greater influence than traditional forms of media ever did.

RELATED: TikTok removes hashtag for Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ after viral videos circulate (NBC News)

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