TikTok, Y'All Listening/Viewing?

"[Poll: Nearly a third of Americans aged 18 to 24 think the statement] Hamas terrorists killed 1,400 Israeli civilians by shooting them, raping and beheading people including whole families, kids and babies [is false]."

Harvard  University and Harris Insights and Analytics

"[TikTok's parent company] collaborates with public security bureaus across China, including in [the western province of] Xinjiang where it plays an active role in disseminating the party state's propaganda on Xinjiang."

2019 Australian Strategic Policy Institute report

"In our studies, something like almost 40 percent of young people, when they're looking for a place for lunch, they don't go to Google Maps or Search."

"They go to TikTok or Instagram."

Google senior vice-president Prabhakar Raghavan

 

In the partisan approach by lookers-on of the conflict between the State of Israel and the Hamas rulers of Gaza in the Middle East, a majority of Westerners quietly unite in support of Israel following the horrific terrorist attack on border civilians in towns, villages and kibbutzim who were massacred, raped, and taken hostage back into Gaza by the terrorist marauders. And then there is the gap that appears between generations where another segment of the population loudly and emphatically supports Hamas.

Close to 80 percent of Americans state their belief of Hamas as "terrorists", while merely 59 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds concur. Of the younger demographic, over half agree with the contention that the attacks by Hamas "can be justified by the grievance of Palestinians", in comparison to fewer than a quarter of the overall population.

Established facts in reflection of the picture in the round and historical antecedents appear to make no impression on the minds of this divergent-opinion younger demographic. Denial of the sadistic savagery demonstrated by the Hamas terrorists during their October 7 violent incursion into Israel, much less the denial that Hamas is a terrorist organization leaves the question: what inspires these young people to think as they do?

Just as a healthy diet makes for a healthy body, it seems credible to many in the field of human psychology that a steady diet of questionable and even baldly false faux news makes for a tainted mindset. And TikTok seems to be one of the main culprits involved in this mystery. In Canada, national security concerns led to the federal government banning the app from civil servants' phones, and it was further abandoned in the interests of security by politicians.

The company owning TikTok which is Byte Dance, is China-based, and the Chinese Communist Party demands loyalty from all Chinese, companies and individuals alike, wherever in the world they happen to be. Demanding access to users' data or the app's use for surveillance purposes are both not only likely to occur, but almost guaranteed. Even though TikTok claims to have self-corrected moderation guidelines there is no way to know who has ultimate control of its content or its use of collected data.

Generation Zers now use TikTok as a primary news source and search engine. TikTok was rife with mis- and disinformation when Russia invaded Ukraine. Influencers unwittingly took what they found there as factual and in turn spread the propaganda. Anti-Israel bot farms appear very actively on the app to influence the narrative and boost support for Hamas under the screen of "pro-Palestine" hashtags.

 

Above: Instagram post with misleading caption about NYU students’ chant

 

The app's powerful algorithm, once a viewer focuses on an item, feeds them greater amounts of what they have viewed and interacted with. Watching or commenting on merely one or two pro-Hamas or anti-Israel posts launches a veritable avalanche of them. Their purpose is to spread distorted truth, outright falsehoods and antisemitism.

All of which, when viewers are sufficiently steeped in the propaganda they eventually take for reality, leads them to denial of the horrors of the atrocities committed during the massive terrorist attack, feeling an obligation to defend the actions of the terrorists, since what they have ingested through the false news they feed on and digested, leads them to view it all as the truth and Hamas the victim of Israel. 

All of which led young people across North America and elsewhere to bring these views to the public fore, taking part in 'pro-Palestine' protests and demonstrations, and there passionately shouting such antisemitic slogans as "from the river to the sea", spelling out the threatened obliteration of Israel itself, the foundational goal of Hamas which isn't listed as a terrorist group in most Western countries for no reason at all.

 

"TikTok is hardly alone. One post on X, formerly Twitter, was viewed more than 20,000 times and flagged as misleading by London-based social media watchdog Reset for purporting to show Israelis staging civilian deaths for cameras. Another X post the group flagged, viewed 55,000 times, was an antisemitic meme featuring Pepe the Frog, a cartoon that has been appropriated by far-right white supremacists. On Instagram, a widely shared and viewed video of parachuters dropping in on a crowd and captioned “imagine attending a music festival when Hamas parachutes in” was debunked over the weekend and, in fact, showed unrelated parachute jumpers in Egypt. (Instagram later labeled the video as false.)"

CNN Business

Above: TikTok video showing misleading text and footage