TikTok faces calls for ban amid claims of anti-Israel ‘indoctrination’

After coming under fire for its links to China, TikTok is again under the spotlight in the United States amid claims that the popular video app is pushing young people to support Palestinians and Hamas.

In recent weeks, powerful politicians, including senators Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio and House Representative Mike Gallagher, have reiterated calls for a ban on TikTok, citing the app’s alleged bias towards anti-Israel and anti-Jewish content.

“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,” Hawley said in a letter to US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Tuesday.

Hawley cited a recent Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll in which 51 percent of Americans aged 18-24 said that Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel could be justified by Palestinians’ grievances, in contrast to older Americans who overwhelmingly back Israel.

“Analysts have attributed this disparity to the ubiquity of anti-Israel content on TikTok, where most young internet users get their information about the world,” Hawley said.

Rubio said last month that TikTok was among a number of platforms that had become “cesspools of [pro-Hamas] misinformation and indoctrination” and a vehicle for “brainwashing”.

TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has long been in the crosshairs of US lawmakers over claims that the app promotes Beijing’s agenda, including by suppressing content on sensitive issues like Taiwan and the repression of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang.

Democrats and Republicans introduced several bills aimed at banning or restricting TikTok, but those efforts have stalled due to free speech concerns.

Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, TikTok’s influence has been thrust back into the public arena amid scrutiny of the prominence of pro-Palestinian content.

Last month, American venture capitalist Jeff Morris Jr wrote a lengthy series of posts on X alleging that the app’s algorithm was corrupting young people by swaying them from the traditionally pro-Israel stance of most Americans.

Morris Jr expressed alarm that the hashtag “#standwithpalestine” had three billion views, compared with 200 million for “#standwithisrael”.

“When I engaged with one post on TikTok supporting opposing views, my entire feed became aggressively anti-Israel,” he said, adding it was as if he was “told to see this war with Israel being the evil side”.

“Because the TikTok narrative is now so anti-Israel, the engagement flywheel encourages creators to support that narrative because it’s getting the most attention, and creating anti-Israel content helps them increase their following.”

Duelling hashtags

TikTok did not provide a comment when contacted by Al Jazeera but has previously stated that it “stands against terrorism” and removes hateful and violent content.

TikTok said in a statement last week that it had removed more than 925,000 videos in the conflict region for “violating our policies around violence, hate speech, misinformation, and terrorism, including content promoting Hamas”, and millions of more posts globally.

The hashtag #freepalestine dwarfed both, being featured in 177,000 posts with 946 million views.

None of the hashtags about the conflict cracked the top 100 over the period, during which the app was dominated by content related to Halloween, a meme about Ohio, and the film adaption of the video game Five Nights at Freddy’s.

Globally, pro-Palestine content overwhelmingly dominated with #freepalestine and #standwithpalestine racking up 11 billion and one billion views, respectively.