If a recent poll is to be believed, half of American adults under the age of twenty-four support Hamas in its conflict with Israel. Congressman Mike Gallagher argues that TikTok, an app for the dissemination of short videos, may be part of what’s shaping these views:

TikTok is not just an app teenagers use to make viral dance videos. A growing number of Americans rely on it for their news. Today, TikTok is the top search engine for more than half of Gen Z, and about six in ten Americans are hooked on the app before their seventeenth birthday. And it is controlled by America’s foremost adversary, one that does not share our interests or our values: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is Chinese, and in China there is no such thing as a private company. As if to underscore the point, ByteDance’s chief editor, Zhang Fuping, is also the boss of the company’s internal Communist-party cell.

If you doubt that the CCP would introduce bias—against Israel, against Jews, against the West, or anything else—into apps under its de-facto control, consider that on October 31 the Wall Street Journal reported that the Chinese web platforms Baidu and Alibaba have wiped Israel off the map—literally. The two most widely used mapping programs in China show the outlines of Israel’s territory but do not label it as Israel, and may not have for some time.

In the best-case scenario, TikTok is CCP spyware—that’s why governments have banned it on official phones. In the worst-case scenario, TikTok is perhaps the largest-scale malign influence operation ever conducted.

Israel’s goals of freeing the hostages and defeating Hamas (the latter necessary to prevent further hostage taking) are to some extent contradictory, since Yahya Sinwar, the ruler of the Gaza Strip, will only turn over hostages in exchange for concessions. But Jacob Nagel remains convinced that Jerusalem should continue to pursue both goals:

Only consistent military pressure on Hamas can lead to the hostages’ release, either through negotiation or military operation. There’s little chance of reaching a deal with Hamas using current approaches, including the latest Egyptian proposal. Israeli concessions would only encourage further pressure from Hamas.

There is no incentive for Hamas to agree to a deal, especially since it believes it can achieve its full objectives without one. Unfortunately, many contribute to this belief, mainly from outside of Israel, but also from within.

Recent months saw Israel mistakenly refraining from entering Rafah for several reasons. Initially, the main [reason was to try] to negotiate a deal with Hamas. However, as it became clear that Hamas was uninterested, and its only goal was to return to its situation before October 7—where Hamas and its leadership control Gaza, Israeli forces are out, and there are no changes in the borders—the deal didn’t mature.