Chairman Gallagher on the Overwhelming Support for Hamas on TikTok
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For weeks, we’ve seen the clips and read the firsthand stories documenting Hamas’ atrocities.
Burned bodies, decapitated babies, raped women, children tied together with their parents, mutilated corpses.
Images and stories so malignantly evil it’s hard to put into words.
Then a further shock.
Rallies on elite college campuses celebrating Hamas’ murderous cause, faculty letters excusing the terrorists,
I thought I’d seen the bottom. I thought I’d gone numb.
But then I read a Harvard poll: 51 percent of Americans ages 18–24 believe Hamas was justified in its brutal terrorist attacks on innocent Israeli citizens on October 7
How did we reach a point where a majority of young Americans hold such a morally bankrupt view of the world? Where many young Americans were rooting for terrorists who had kidnapped American citizens—and against a key American ally? Where were they getting the raw news to inform this upside-down world view?
The short answer is, increasingly, via TikTok. TikTok is not just an app teenagers use to make viral dance videos. A growing number of Americans rely on it for their news. Today, TikTok is the top search engine for more than half of Gen Z,. And it is controlled by America’s foremost adversary: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is Chinese, and in China there is no such thing as a private company.
We know for a fact that the CCP uses TikTok to push its propaganda and censor views that diverge from the party line. Reports have confirmed that TikTok spied on journalists who wrote negative stories about TikTok. Via TikTok, Chinese state media pushed divisive information about U.S. politicians ahead of midterm elections.
Numerous reports have found TikTok censoring and suppressing content about Xinjiang, Tibet, Tiananmen Square, and other issues sensitive to the CCP. TikTok has also suppressed content about LGBT issues, and even temporarily blocked a teenage American Muslim activist who criticized the CCP’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims.
If you doubt that the CCP would introduce anti-semitic or anti-Western bias into apps under its de facto control, consider that on October 31 The Wall Street Journal reported that Chinese web platforms Baidu and Alibaba have wiped Israel off the map—literally. The two most widely used mapping programs in China show the outlines of Israel’s territory but do not label it as Israel, and may not have for some time.
For those who know the CCP, this comes as no surprise. Propaganda and censorship are core features of its governing philosophy.
In the best-case scenario, TikTok is CCP spyware—that’s why so many state and national governments have banned it on official phones. In the worst-case scenario, TikTok is perhaps the largest scale malign influence operation ever conducted.
Allowing a CCP-controlled entity to become the dominant media platform in America would be as if, in 1962, right before the Cuban Missile Crisis, we had allowed Pravda and the KGB to purchase The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC, and NBC. And that’s probably understating the stupidity.
It’s time to ban TikTok. The clock is ticking.