Since the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, which have sparked surges of antisemitic acts worldwide, Jewish and Israeli employees of TikTok report a lack of support and insights into the biases underlying the platform’s heavily criticized content moderation.
In interviews with Fox Business, these workers said that many of the 40,000 people employed to remove hate speech on the platform would leave antisemitic content, according to their own biases. They also said their colleagues have spewed antisemitic comments on the company chat, backing up their stories with screenshots in which TikTok employees celebrated the massacre of 1,200 men, women and children by Hamas operatives and Palestinians from Gaza.
TikTok rejected the accuracy of the Jewish and Israeli employees’ evidence, saying they “do not reflect the experience of the majority of our employees.”
“A lot of these kids are getting their source in news from TikTok,” Enes Kanter Freedom, the Turkish Muslim NBA star-turned-Zionist activist, told JNS. “Kids are being brainwashed; there’s lots of misinformation on that app.”
Freedom urged young users to read history books instead of relying on social-media platforms, saying “I want every kid in the world to stop watching TikTok.”
He identified social media as “definitely the No. 1” factor in the surge of antisemitic speech and incidents over the last few years.