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TikTok is back in Washington’s crosshairs, with Republican lawmakers renewed calls to ban the popular short-form video app amid accusations that it amplifies pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel videos through its powerful algorithmic feed.
This past week, Senator Hawley of Missouri asked the Biden administration to ban TikTok due to the “ubiquity” of anti-Israel content. Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin said the app was “brainwashing” America’s youth into sympathizing with Hamas. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida accused Beijing officials of using TikTok, whose parent company is based in China, to spread propaganda among Americans.
“A regime that hates America controls TikTok’s algorithm and uses it to divide and demoralize Americans,” Rubio, who has introduced legislation to ban the app, said in a statement. “What we’re seeing now is a real-life demonstration of that capability. We should have banned TikTok a long time ago, but this should be a wake-up call.”
Criticism of TikTok, which has increased since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, has put the company on its heels at a precarious time.
The company’s status in the United States has been in limbo since 2020, as it has been accused by Democrats and Republicans of being a tool of surveillance and propaganda by the Chinese communist government. The Biden administration has been investigating whether the app poses a national security problem. Lawmakers have introduced several bills to restrict the app, although they have been stymied in Congress over concerns about regulating speech and regulatory overreach.
ByteDance, which owns TikTok, has for years refuted claims that it poses a privacy or security risk. It has also said in recent weeks that the app does not disproportionately promote pro-Palestinian content. Since the start of the conflict, the company says it has removed 925,000 videos in the conflict region for violating its policies on violence, hate speech, disinformation and terrorism, including content promoting Hamas.
“The content on TikTok is generated by our community and recommendations are based on content-neutral signals from users, and nothing more,” said Alex Haurek, a TikTok spokesperson.
The Treasury Department, which is leading the Biden administration’s investigation into TikTok, declined to comment.
TikTok, which has more than 100 million users in the United States, including many young adults, started the year under intense scrutiny, with several lawmakers pushing for a ban. The app has been banned from state and federal devices, as well as government devices in New York City. In March, Congress questioned TikTok’s CEO about its ownership structure and how TikTok stored U.S. user data.
Last week, the company attempted to defend itself against accusations that it was promoting anti-Israel content, which has sparked unrest among Republicans in particular. It released a statement saying that the hashtag #standwithisrael had been viewed 46.3 million times in the United States as of October 7, compared to 29.4 million for #standwithpalestine.
But that claim was immediately endorsed by critics, including Jacob Helberg, a member of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, and Anthony Goldbloom, a statistician and former CEO of Kaggle, a machine learning company.
Mr. Goldbloom has argued that TikTok had hand-picked hashtags that inaccurately reflected the prevalence of pro-Palestinian content. He pointed to data from TikTok’s public advertising platform for the hashtag #FreePalestine, which has generated 946 million views in the United States over 30 days as of Wednesday, and compared it to the 117 million views on #Israel🇮🇱, which features an Israeli flag . , in the same period.
About 58 percent of the audience for the #FreePalestine hashtag was 18 to 24 year olds, compared to 24 percent for that audience on the #Israel🇮🇱 hashtag. Mr. Goldbloom said he found that “incredibly interesting,” in contrast to a recent poll of registered voters. According to the poll, conducted by Harvard-Harris, most people aged 25 or older supported the Jewish state, while 52 percent of voters aged 18 to 25 said they sided with Israel and 48 percent sided with Hamas.
Mr. Helberg said he had spoken to 100 different lawmakers in the past year. “Everyone agrees that TikTok is a national risk,” he said, but added that they differed on how to solve the problem. He said the accusations about content related to the war between Israel and Hamas were a “sinking force” for Washington.
Politicians “are seeing such a vivid example of how the foreign influence of a foreign adversary could actually impact a crucial national security debate that affects lives here in the US as well as in Israel,” he said in an interview on Tuesday. “We are in a time where this could have real consequences.”
Senator Hawley said in a letter this week that the conflict underscored the continuing power of the platform.
TikTok has the “power to radically distort the worldview that American young people encounter,” said Mr. Hawley, who on Wednesday called for a Senate vote on a bill he wrote to ban the app. “Israel’s war with Hamas is a crucial test case.”
