Why Bin Laden’s Manifesto Was Changed? The Case of TikTok Against Israel, the Middle East, and the Holocaust
The content that TikTok is taking action against is the one written by Osama bin Laden. TikTok says it is actively and aggressively removing the content on X and is investigating how it got onto its platform.
CNN reported on the topic of “Letter to America,” a video that has amassed at least 14 million views by Thursday, after dozens of videos about it surfaced on TikTok. Originally published in 2002, the manifesto criticizes the US government’s presence in the Middle East and support of Israel. Some creators are trying to apply the criticism to the US government’s response to the war in Israel.
A transcript of the letter, which The Guardian published in 2002, rose to the top of the British publication’s most-viewed stories, leading the site to remove it altogether. A spokesman for the paper said it was taken down since it had been “widely shared on social media without the full context.”
The Israel-Hamas war has been a huge test for TikTok, and the platform will only continue to face pressure to strictly moderate its content, especially since nearly one-third of young adults use TikTok to get their news.
The videos do not seem to have ever gone viral, despite public data showing that there is a bin Laden content on TikTok.
There were fewer than 300 videos using the hashtag According to TikTok a platform with an estimated 1.6 billion monthly active users, the message #lettertoamerica received 2 million views by Wednesday. For comparison, a recent 24-hour period on the platform had 200 million videos using #GymTok and #travel videos racked up 137 million.
The videos caused a lot of moral panic because it suggested that the writing of a terrorist had been increased by TikTok.
“This story speaks to how far there still is to go in boosting social media literacy and how susceptible everyone is to information disorder and suggestion,” Holt told NPR. “Even those who might consider themselves people trying to speak truth against falsehoods are not immune. The election cycle next year will be gasoline on these longstanding faults.
How bin Laden’s manifesto was changed is one of the biggest mysteries in the saga. Some of the original TikToks were created by health and wellbeing professionals, but it is not clear where that original venom came from.
The origins of the phenomenon do not seem to have been coordinated by a single person, according to a research fellow with the Accelerationism Research Consortium.
“My understanding is that coordinated inauthentic behavior on TikTok is more likely to utilize anonymous meme pages than influencers. Richards wrote on X that her analysis is based on a preliminary understanding of the situation. “So in short, we don’t know for sure.”
Attempt to hide the terrorist leader’s incendiary writing on social media and its influence on the extremist forums: Insights from CrowdTangle
There were rumors that there was a concerted effort to hide the document from the internet. It also led to pushback from some researchers, who argued that the terrorist leader’s incendiary writing should remain published to expose it for what it is.
The letter’s re-appearance was seen as a cause for celebration by the supporters of al-Qaeda. The person who wrote about the storm on social media is a user of the extremist forums. More and more content is what we should post.
Since there is limited access to TikTok’s internal data, it is more difficult to understand how popular certain content is. That is true on other sites as well. Elon Musk has taken away researchers’ ability to analyze the site’s metrics, setting something of a new norm among the platforms of boxing out independent review of patterns and trends on social media platforms.
It’s difficult to verify trends on either platform, according to Brandon Silverman, the former CEO of CrowdTangle.
