Dirty, ugly and deadly politics behind America’s TikTok block

Israel’s war on Gaza, rather than China, is the real drive behind Biden’s ‘ban or sell’ law because young US app users tend to be pro-Palestinian

President Joe Biden has signed legislation ordering the forced sale of TikTok or its complete ban across the United States. The fact that American politicians went after the immensely popular app is not surprising, given its Chinese ownership. But the speed with which lawmakers have managed to push through the law does make you question the timing.

After all, their antagonism has gone off and on for the past four years, so why this desperate urgency? The threatened ban is not without precedent, of course. In 2020, Washington forced Chinese video-game developer Kunlun Tech to sell its LGBTQ dating app, Grindr, in the US to an American company on the grounds of national security. Well, you never know about those congressional staff and politicians.

But TikTok is no Grindr. It has 150 million active daily users, most of whom are aged between 16 and 35, a key electoral demographic for the Democrats. A Democrat White House doesn’t want to antagonise such voters, especially in an election year.

But all that changed after the October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas, and then Israel’s scorched-earth war on Gaza.

That’s the most plausible explanation offered by a Wall Street Journal report and an analysis by Glenn Greenwald, one of the key journalists behind Edward Snowden’s exposé of the US National Security Agency’s hitherto unknown mass surveillance, both at home and abroad.

Of the most popular social media platforms, TikTok appears to have the most pro-Palestinian posts. I use “appear” because TikTok has released statistics that claim to prove otherwise. It claimed that the hashtag #standwithisrael had 46 million views in the US between October 7 and 31, which was far ahead of the hashtag #standwithpalestine, with 29 million views.

Of course, that was before the substantial rise in civilian deaths among the Palestinian population.

Powerful pro-Israeli lobbyists and politicians on Capitol Hill were alarmed by how Israel was portrayed in those clips. Naturally, they blamed TikTok. But independent observers have argued that’s simply the trend among young Americans.

A staggering 30 per cent of adults under 30 consume news on TikTok, and Palestine has been the biggest news story on the app. And even before the terror attacks, a March 2023 Gallup survey showed 49 per cent of Democratic Party supporters were sympathetic to the Palestinian cause as opposed to 38 per cent who favoured Israel. Once Israel launched the Gaza siege, Palestinian support shot up, and that is reflected in many posts on TikTok.

From mid-October to mid-November, support for Palestine among young voters jumped from 26 per cent to 52 per cent, according to a Quinnipiac University poll.

So it seems the threat posed by TikTok is not that it could be exploited by Beijing, but that it couldn’t be so easily interfered with by the US law enforcement and security agencies, as Elon Musk’s leaks of the Twitter, now called X, files have shown with other home-grown popular platforms. That’s partly because of the intense scrutiny of TikTok by everyone, which ironically forces it to do everything by the book.

There is another Israeli, and deadlier connection. Republican congressman Mike Gallagher, an uber-hawk against China and one of the cosponsors of the successful “ban or sell” TikTok bill, has quit Congress to join defence contractor Palantir, according to a report in Forbes. In other words, Gallagher has joined a military surveillance firm having achieved a legacy of helping to pass a bill alleging potential Chinese state surveillance.

On its X and LinkedIn pages, Palantir proudly declares, “We stand with Israel.” While US intelligence (AI) and the military provide information to its Israeli counterparts about Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups, such data is believed to have been fed into artificial intelligence programs developed by firms such as Palantir to select military targets in Gaza. Many experts believe automated AI has contributed to the high civilian death toll.

Imagine Washington’s reaction if Palantir was Chinese-owned and its AI was being used in Xinjiang. Scream GENOCIDE!

Many experts believe automated AI has contributed to the high civilian death toll [in Gaza]