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TikTok Pushes Back Against Claims It Fuels Antisemitism
The company said it had removed millions of TikTok videos in recent weeks related to hate speech, hateful behavior, harassment and bullying.
TikTok pushed back on Thursday against growing claims in recent weeks that it had failed to protect Jewish users and had pushed pro-Palestinian content in the United States.
In a statement on its website the company said, “Hateful ideologies, like antisemitism, are not and have never been allowed on our platform.” The company said that since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, it had removed millions of TikTok videos related to hate speech, hateful behavior, harassment and bullying.
Many social networks have come under criticism for spreading misinformation and hate speech during the Israel-Hamas war. TikTok has the added scrutiny of being owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. While Beijing has pitched itself as a neutral broker in the dispute, a surge of antisemitism and anti-Israeli sentiment is proliferating across the Chinese internet and state media.
Last week, Jeff Morris Jr., a former vice president at the dating app Tinder, claimed that pro-Palestinian hashtags on TikTok garnered three billion views while pro-Israel hashtags gathered a couple hundred million views. His post, published on X, formerly known as Twitter, was part of a longer thread that was seen millions of times and argued that TikTok was the reason Israel was “losing the information war with high school & college students.”
Republican lawmakers like Senator Marco Rubio of Florida have jumped on such concerns. In a post on X on Wednesday, Mr. Rubio said, “TikTok is a tool China uses to spread propaganda to Americans, now it’s being used to downplay Hamas terrorism.”
But Mr. Morris’s post appeared to reference views from the hashtags over several years. The company seemed to refer to Mr. Morris’s posts on Thursday, criticizing an “unsound analysis of TikTok hashtag data around the conflict.” TikTok said the hashtag #standwithisrael had gained 46.3 million views since Oct. 7 in the United States compared with 29.4 million for #standwithpalestine. Mr. Morris didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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