Both the Israeli military and 9/11 families blasted the social media platform TikTok on Friday for allowing a decades-old, resurfaced letter written by deceased terrorist Osama bin Laden to go viral on its platform along with user videos promoting it.
The groups were responding to bin Laden's 2002 "Letter to America," the Saudi-born terrorist's justification for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that reportedly garnered 14 million views on TikTok before the platform removed them.
Younger users on the platform took to praising bin Laden's propaganda and expressing sympathy for his cause, drawing the ire of 9/11 Families United and the Israel Defense Forces on Friday.
"No American should ever not know Osama bin Laden was a terrorist who helped mastermind the murder of nearly 3,000 innocent Americans on September 11, 2001," Terry Strada, national chair of 9/11 Families United, said in a statement posted to the group's website.
"It is appalling to witness younger Americans voicing sympathy for bin Laden's dangerous and antisemitic worldview 22 years after our nation was horrifically attacked and our loved ones were callously murdered by Islamists who were financially supported by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and at Osama bin Laden's direction."
Bin Laden was killed in 2011 by U.S. Special Forces in Pakistan.
"We strongly encourage these Americans who are not old enough to remember the brutality of 9/11 to seek out reliable sources to educate themselves instead of forming their misguided opinions based on false TikTok videos. We also call on TikTok to stop allowing its platform to be used to promote terrorist propaganda," Strada added.
TikTokers found an archived, translated copy of bin Laden's letter on The Guardian website and then circulated it on the Chinese-owned platform, Time reported. The Guardian has since removed the stand-alone letter from its website.
"Taking a brief, and what should be unnecessary, pause to remind anyone who is confused ... Osama Bin Laden was a genocidal terrorist personally responsible for one of the biggest crimes in modern history," the IDF said in a post to X, formerly Twitter. "Like Hamas, Al Qaeda used antisemitic radical ideology to justify the wholesale murder of thousands of men, women and children."
TikTokers propagated bin Laden's letter on the platform for days, using it to heap more criticism on the U.S. over its support of Israel in its efforts to eradicate Hamas. TikTok reacted Thursday to remove the offending posts but rejected the assertion that they went viral, saying, "Reports of it trending on our platform are inaccurate.
"We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform," TikTok wrote Thursday. "The number of videos on TikTok is small ..."
TikTok is owned by ByteDance, which has ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.
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