Why TikTok Promotes Anti-Israel Sentiment

March 14 2024

Yesterday, the House of Representatives passed a bill banning the popular video app TikTok if the Chinese media company ByteDance doesn’t divest its shares. The app allows for the easy sharing of short videos and, thanks especially to its algorithms, wastes countless hours of time. But the more serious problem is that companies like ByteDance are de-facto organs of the Chinese government, and TikTok is already being used to surveil and collect tremendous amounts of data about Americans. Moreover, because the app works by offering up a stream of suggested videos to users, its programmers can amplify content with the political and ideological messages it favors. And that’s why Jews, and friends of the Jewish state, should hope the Senate approves the bill. Cole Aronson explains:

One month after the October 7 Hamas attack, TikTok videos with hashtags like #freepalestine were watched by Americans about 50 times more than pro-Israel ones. Although the app’s users skew young and hence leftward, their politics probably don’t account for the ratio. . . . Moreover, the company apparently rejected ads from the families of Israeli hostages as too political while accepting ones from pro-Palestinian groups.

In fact, a 2023 study suggested that spending at least 30 minutes per day on TikTok increases a person’s chance of holding anti-Semitic or anti-Israel beliefs by 17 percent. Aronson looks into why this is so:

One way to approach China’s strategic interest in American opposition to Israel is through the works of Wang Huning, the fourth-highest ranking member of the ruling Politburo Standing Committee and China’s most powerful intellectual. . . . In 1988, Wang spent several months in the United States. The final section of his remarkable philosophical travel memoir, America against America, notes America’s difficulty cultivating faithful heirs of its traditions.

Wang’s early tract and his seniority in the CCP suggest . . . a hostile bid for the management of what young Americans believe and feel, to impede older Americans from passing on their way of life.

The U.S.-Israel alliance is especially vulnerable to such a strategy. In Congress, and among older voters, support for Israel remains a point of unusual bipartisan agreement. But a Quinnipiac poll from October 17, 2023, found a 30-percentage-point gap between voters older than 50 and voters younger than 35 on whether America should arm Israel against Hamas. It is difficult to think of another political topic with that degree of intergenerational fracture.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: Anti-Semitism, China, Israel-China relations, Social media, U.S. Foreign policy

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023