TikTok: Promoting bin Laden’s narrative?
“Osama bin Laden is the latest hot new TikTok influencer,” said Jim Geraghty in National Review. That might sound like a bad joke, but when bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America” justifying the Sept. 11 attacks circulated on the social media site last week, “some gullible young users” said the letter had opened their eyes to America’s sins. “We’ve been lied to our entire lives,” said one TikTok user. Another said bin Laden’s critique of the U.S. was “life-changing.” In his letter, the fanatical cult leader explains that the U.S. deserved to see nearly 3,000 people murdered in al Qaida’s terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon because Americans support “Israeli oppression of the Palestinians,” oppress Muslims throughout the Middle East, and pollute the planet. About 2 million people viewed user videos discussing bin Laden’s letter, with some contending that
“the most notorious terrorist in American history wasn’t such a bad guy after all.”
It’s past time to “ban TikTok,” said the Washington Examiner in an editorial. Prior to the bin Laden letter, TikTok—which was founded in China and answers to Beijing—bathed its young audience in videos defending Hamas and comparing Israelis to Nazis. How much longer will we let China, “our most potent foreign adversary,” brainwash the young through this virtual “mindcontrol device?”
Let’s not get carried away, said Philip Bump in The Washington Post. The bin Laden “tempest” all started with fewer than 300 videos watched about 2 million times. That’s hardly an indictment of “Gen Z writ large,” given that TikTok has 150 million U.S.-based accounts, and skin-care videos routinely rack up 250 million daily views. But when widely followed journalist Yashar Ali posted a compilation of bin Laden reactions on X, that tweet gained 38 million views—triggering a “paranoid, predictable” media panic that gave the videos exponentially more attention. Fox News mentioned the story at least 100 times, with commentators also blaming TikTok for the surge in Gen Z teens identifying as trans. I suspect most TikTokers did not actually read all of Bin Laden’s “jeremiad,” said Fred Kaplan in Slate. He denounces secular, sinful America because of its tolerance of “fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants,” and demands “complete submission” to fundamentalist Islam. Is that the “wake-up call” young Americans really want?