The U.S. government may attempt to force a sale of TikTok — would that help fix problems of hate speech on the platform? Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images

Laura E. Adkins March 19, 2024

It should be a no-brainer for American Jews to support the bill proposing a forced sale of TikTok passed by the House of Representatives last week, which will next be considered by the Senate.

The social media video app, which is currently used by 150 million Americans, is the No. 1 source of news for Americans under 25. It’s also a tool that the U.S. government has found China is using to meddle in our elections and sow social unrest with impunity.

As antisemitic rhetoric has surged on the platform following the terror attacks of Oct. 7 and the ensuing war, TikTok has removed crucial transparency tools, showing it has no intention of working with researchers, journalists and civil society organizations to understand the extent of — and eventually curb — the hate speech rampant on its platform. Rather than work to fix the problem, the company is focused on an apology tour that comes too little, too late.

As I noted in December, China has ample reason to try to skew American perceptions of the war in Gaza: “China is using TikTok to protect their investments,” I wrote, which “include interests in Arab countries antagonistic to the Jewish state.” Pro-Palestinian sentiment is, of course, not inherently anti-Jewish. But TikTok’s algorithm has a history of buoying antisemitic and anti-Western content, as was made horrifyingly clear when videos lauding Osama bin Laden’s antisemitic “Letter to America” went viral in November.

All this noise has a clear impact on public perceptions. A December New York Times poll of registered voters found a correlation between TikTok usage and criticism of the Biden administration’s policies toward Israel, even when controlling for age.

In the ensuing months, things have only gotten worse, as new evidence has emerged about the extent to which the Chinese government leverages social media in ways that are harmful to our democracy.

A recently declassified February report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence warned that China is increasingly sophisticated in its efforts to sow division across the United States.

“Beijing is intensifying efforts to mold U.S. public discourse,” the report stated. Yet rather than working with regulators to understand and fix the problem, TikTok’s ostensibly independent parent company, ByteDance, has doubled down on their lobbying efforts, recruiting influencers and imploring everyday users to plead with their members of Congress on the company’s behalf.

We know from prior reporting and research that one way China works to shape American beliefs is by supporting anti-Israel narratives. Researchers have documented distortions in the volume of content on the app supporting narratives pushed by the Chinese government on issues including the Uyghur genocide, Tiananmen Square and the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine; a similar distortion is visible when it comes to the ratio of pro-Palestinian to pro-Israel videos on TikTok.

“These discrepancies align consistently with the strategic interests of the Chinese government,” the researchers who identified that distortion wrote.

Trying for transparency — kind of

In January, TikTok’s top government relations employee in Israel resigned over concerns that the company has a flawed approach to anti-Israel videos and that TikTok’s own moderators showed support for terrorism. Other Jewish employees anonymously told Fox Business reporters that they face a climate of hostility and harassment at work, including co-workers who celebrated the attacks of Oct. 7 on the company’s internal messaging system.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog met with TikTok executives last month, presenting them with research indicating that the platform was slow to respond to antisemitic content. The evidence he shared reportedly left the executives “deeply disturbed.”

But that’s not all. Within days of my December story’s publication, TikTok’s interface changed to make it impossible for users to search for trending topics on TikTok. The app still provides a list of what topics are trending, but the list does not include any English-language topics of a political nature.

This change has made it even more difficult for researchers to get a sense of how widespread hateful content is on TikTok. Researchers wishing to use TikTok’s researcher Application Programming Interface already had to submit their research topics for approval ahead of time, and were restricted in the number of queries they could make per day. Journalists and civil society organizations cannot access the data at all.

Yet despite abundant evidence that things have gone off the rails, the company is making a concerted — if not convincing — effort to show decision-makers that they have everything under control.

Last month, the app, whose parent company has previously been caught tracking the location data of specific journalists, opened a so-called “transparency center” in Los Angeles. The company said the center is designed to give “invited guests” the “opportunity to see up close how we moderate and recommend content, secure our platform, and protect people’s privacy.” In reality, one journalist from The Verge described the place as “a lot of smoke and mirrors designed to give the impression that it really cares,” staffed by employees the journalists were not allowed to quote. Another said her press tour “fell short of anything revelatory.”

What’s clear: TikTok has committed to a lack of transparency while pretending otherwise, making it increasingly difficult for researchers and journalists to understand the spread of antisemitic and other hate speech on the platform. And that makes it harder to determine just how much China’s thumb is on the scale.

Plus, as long as problems with moderating hateful or violent content persist, whether due to deliberate or unintentional shortcomings, TikTok will continue to be exploited by bad actors — individuals and hostile governments alike.

And that’s before we even get to the myriad surveillance issues, which have led several countries — including the United States — to ban the app on government devices.

Just as we have abundant rules stipulating that foreign nationals and entities can’t control a majority stake in our traditional media companies, so too should we with social media companies. The other major players in this space — Meta, X and others — have their own host of problems with hate speech and content moderation. But they at least have a modicum of transparency — and, crucially, don’t put access to sensitive information and a powerful recommendation algorithm into the hands of a hostile government.

If a forced sale of TikTok goes through, the problems plaguing the app won’t simply disappear. But it will be a major step in addressing the online threats faced Jews everywhere — by putting a foreign adversary that refuses to play by the same rules in its proper, regulated place.

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