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 on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/foreign-policy/15881/israels-tiktok-problem/