PRESIDENT HERZOG MEETS WITH TIKTOK OFFICIALS AS ISRAEL ACCUSES PLATFORM OF PRO-PALESTINE STANCE

Tue 06 February 2024:

A readout by the Israeli president’s office says that Herzog met with senior officials from Chinese-owned social media giant TikTok in Jerusalem to discuss “the increase of cases of antisemitism” and “anti-Israel hatred”.

The meeting comes after months of accusations by both Israel and US lawmakers that TikTok was allowing pro-Palestine videos, which was rallying young people against Israel.

TikTok faces calls for ban

In November 2023, powerful US politicians such as Senators Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio, as well as House Representative Mike Gallagher, renewed calls for TikTok ban, citing the app’s claimed bias toward anti-Israel and anti-Jewish content.

TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has long been in the crosshairs of US lawmakers over claims that the app promotes Beijing’s agenda, including by suppressing content on sensitive issues like Taiwan and the repression of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang.

Democrats and Republicans introduced several bills aimed at banning or restricting TikTok, but those efforts have stalled due to free speech concerns.

Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, TikTok’s influence has been thrust back into the public arena amid scrutiny of the prominence of pro-Palestinian content.

TikTok’s publicly viewable user data suggest a greater affinity for the Palestinian cause among users in the US, although pro-Israel content is also popular on the site.

In December 2023, social media giant Meta was found to have systematically censored pro-Palestine voices during the Gaza war, according to a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The report says that Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has pulled down or suppressed hundreds of pro-Palestine posts due to flawed content moderation policies, poor implementation, and “undue government influence”.

Filter of mainstream media

Edward Ahmed Mitchell, the national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that while there are legitimate concerns about TikTok, the prominence of pro-Palestinian content on the platform is not among them.

“It is nothing short of hypocritical for politicians to want to restrict access to a social media platform because it dares to allow people to freely express their support for Palestinian human rights in a way that other social media platforms do not,”  Mitchell told Al Jazeera.

“Young people have also been exposed to the world and receive their news directly through social media in many cases – not through the filter of mainstream media,” he added.