TikTok is flooded with anti-Israel videos, mostly produced by pro-Palestinian groups – and Jewish leaders say they are poisoning the minds of millions of young adults who get their news from the Chinese platform.
“TikTok is wildly popular, short and to the point, and a superb marketing tool,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. “But its major ingredients are young individuals who don’t have any collective memory and [these videos] they are something that toxins the attitude towards Jews and Israel.”
Movies dubbed by one of the journalists “conflict porn” and one other so-called “Tik Tok Intifada” give attention to the decades-long struggle between Israelis and Palestinians, specializing in the Israeli occupation and ongoing bombing of the Gaza Strip.
Most TikTok videos show either Israeli soldiers shooting Palestinians or apparently forcing them out of their homes.
A smaller percentage of the videos on the site are sympathetic to the Israeli side – and depict Israelis being stabbed or attacked by Palestinians.
Pro-Israel TikTok accounts like _israel_under_attack show terrorist attacks carried out on Israelis by Palestinians.
But the most virulent movies portray Israelis as villains. Much anti-Israel content could be found under the #FreePalestine hashtag, with some of the most virulent coming from accounts with names like “Ihateisrael5”, “freepalestine_hateisrael” and “ihateisrael1984”.
“Israel is apartheid,” we read accompanying text a video from the #FreePalestine account. The clip shows Israeli police attacking a Palestinian man during a forced eviction in Sheikh Jarrah, a predominantly Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. “Israel is killing Palestinians. Israel is stealing Palestinian homes. Help the Palestinians.”
Jewish leaders told The Post that anti-Israel content is harmful, often full of lies, and unchecked by TikTok moderators.
Cooper said that “not every video published by Palestinians” is inaccurate. But he said the major problem with TikTok videos “is that they do not allow for debate or discussion. All the pieces is presented as truth without context.
Activist Andrea Karshan of Crown Heights, whose father is Jewish and who identifies as “patrilineal Jew, former Muslim convert,” told The Post that she is each pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian. But, as an lively TikTok user added, the anti-Israel content on the platform is worrying.
“Most of them say that Israel is the occupier and that it’s an apartheid state and that the IDF is killing Palestinian children,” Karshan told The Post. “It’s like war… jamming pro-Israeli content with pro-Palestinian content.”
Karshan said many pro-Palestinian TikTok users attack anyone they see as unrelated to their cause.
“Every pro-Israel TikTokker is attacked and doxxed by these people,” said Karshan. “They followed my children and said they’d contact my son’s school. They knew my baby’s nickname.
University of Haifa Prof. Gabriel Weimann told the Jerusalem Post. that the videos contain fake news dominated by anti-Israel and anti-Jewish messages.
“Since nobody controls, regulates or screens these videos, you’ll be able to post whatever you wish,” he said. “There are many lies.”
But on the pro-Palestinian side, there are many who imagine that Palestinian voices have been deliberately silenced over the years, with some citing the late Columbia University professor Edward Said, a Palestinian-American who he argued in 1984 that the Palestinians had been denied “narrative permission”.
in essay for Al JazeeraCalifornian author and Palestinian activist Omar Zahzah said that tech corporations are “currently actively working to exclude Palestinian voices from their platforms, thus extending the calculated removal and silencing of Palestinians to social media.”
In April 2021, Zoom, Facebook and Youtube blocked the online academic event “Whose narratives? What freedom of speech for Palestine?” which was co-sponsored by the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies program at San Francisco State University, the University of California Faculty Association Board, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute.
So-called anti-apartheid activists from around the world, including Palestinian resistance icon Leila Khaled and former South African ANC military leader Ronnie Kasrils, were scheduled to talk at the event. Social media corporations cited Khaled’s affiliation with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – a “United States-designated terrorist organization” – as the reason for closing the event.
“Don’t take heed to the media. Go to the region, see it for yourself and consult with people,” said Karshan.
She said she was planning a visit to Israel for the first time soon.