CLAIM: Nikki Haley says TikTok makes those who consume it more likely to hold antisemitic views than they were before.
VERDICT: PARTLY TRUE. There is one recent survey to back that up, though there are questions about its methodology.
Former UN Ambassador and South Carolina governor Haley called for a ban on TikTok during the fourth Republican Presidential Debate on Wednesday night in Alabama, carried live on NewsNation. (It is a position that some other candidates share with her.)
In justifying that position, she said that there was a survey that had shown that for every 30 minutes spent on TikTok, viewers became 17% more antisemitic. That wasn’t exactly what the survey said, but it was not too far off. From the UK Jewish News:
TikTok users who spend just 30 minutes a day on the site increase their chance of holding “antisemitic or anti-Israel” views, compared with other social media platforms, a survey shows.
According to the US-based survey, this likelihood increased by 17 percent, compared with six percent on Instagram and X’s two percent.
The report was carried out by Anthony Goldbloom, the founder of data science company Kaggle, which was acquired by Google in 2017, alongside other tech individuals. It suggests that TikTok – which has over one billion monthly users – is shaping anti-Israel views among 18-to-29 year olds.
Goldbloom acknowledged that the survey disagreed with survey data about the opinions of young people roughly in the same age bracket he studied, who are split between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian views. But he suggested TikTok is shaping their views.
It is hard to know what the effect of TikTok is — though it is noteworthy that China, which owns the platform, restricts its use.
The survey does not appear to have had a control group — i.e. a group that did not consume social media at all. It also noted that there are many more pro-Palestinian hashtags than pro-Israel ones, though that could do with the fact that Jews are a very tiny minority of the world’s population, whereas there are roughly one billion Muslims who largely favor the Palestinian cause.
Moreover, Israelis also consume TikTok and produce content on the platform. The generation of Israeli soldiers currently doing the fighting in Gaza is often referred to — admiringly — as the TikTok generation, who are sacrificing their lives for their country.
Still, there is no shortage of anti-Israel and antisemitic content on TikTok, and it is ultimately a platform controlled by China — a country that has taken an anti-Israel stance in the war between Israel and Hamas, though it oppresses its own Muslim citizens.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.