TikTok Ban Linked to Pro-Palestine Content, Not China Threat

hackingbear writes: The main reason behind the United States' push to ban social media application TikTok is due to Israel’s image rather than fears of Chinese infiltrations, US Senator Mark Warner and Mike Gallagher have revealed during a panel the Munich Security Conference. Warner, the top Democrat on the intelligence committee, introduced the TikTok ban bill in 2023 along with Gallagher,who is the current Palantir executive. “So we had a bipartisan consensus,” Gallagher said. “We had the executive branch, but the bill was still dead until October 7th. And people started to see a bunch of antisemitic content on the platform and our bill had legs again.” A memo produced by the State Department for its Near East Affairs diplomats, which Klippenstein obtained, describes how Israel's deputy director general for public diplomacy at the foreign ministry, Emmanuel Nahshon, blamed the youth’s opposition to the war on Gaza on TikTok’s algorithm. The memo added that Nahshon said the youth’s public opinion was shifting because “the Tik-Tok algorithm favours pro-Palestinian content”. Gallagher also said in Munich that TikTok had made a “huge miscalculation” in its attempt to circumvent the ban. When TikTok sent a notification to its millions of users urging them to call their members of Congress to oppose the bill, Gallagher said it “proved” that the social media company had “brainwashed” American youth. While President Donald Trump temporarily reversed his Democratic predecessor’s TikTok ban the day after he took office, the application’s future in the country, as well as the state of its pro-Palestine content, remains unclear. When the application was available to Americans again in late January, many users pointed out that phrases like “free Palestine” were being flagged as hate speech, raising concerns about potential censorship on the platform following its return to the US.

Yeah no shit

[Rujiel]

I've been saying this in every tiktok story until now. https://www.axios.com/local/sa... [axios.com] Jonathan Greenblatt himself saying they need to do something like Taglit to get rid of Tiktok. https://electronicintifada.net... [electronicintifada.net]