Young people attending a New York City anti-Israel rally have admitted that they learned to hate Israel by watching pro-Palestinian videos on Chinese-owned app TikTok and Mark Zuckerbeg’s Instagram.
More than a dozen young protesters who skipped school to join an anti-Israel rally in Manhattan on Thursday told the New York Post that their opinions about the Israel-Hamas war were shaped mainly by China’s TikTok and Facebook-owned Instagram, as well as their teachers.
New Utrecht High School students 17-year-old Zara Asif and 16-year-old Manoor Javed told the outlet that TikTok and Instagram videos inspired them to attend pro-Palestinian rallies around the Northeast and Washington D.C. area.
Photographer: Justin Chin/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Mark Zuckerberg (Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC)
“They’re posting pictures of babies with their skulls and their brains leaking out,” Asif said. “It’s mostly [pictures] of little kids that get pushed out on there the most.”
Javed said that while her school prohibits students from talking about pro-Palestinian politics, “Everyone’s pushing and everyone is posting and that’s how we’re going to make a difference,” adding, “We won’t quit — ever.”
Another 17-year-old who identified herself as Adama told the New York Post that she follows Palestinian accounts on TikTok who are based in Gaza, saying, “Places like CNN and other mainstream media are not posting about it.”
St. John’s University student Ravia Sidhu and her 19-year-old friend, CUNY student Zarif Islam, told the outlet that they attended the Thursday rally after what Sidhu said was “a lot of doing our own research” — which included watching videos on the Chinese app.
Anti-Israel protestors were reportedly seen at the Thursday rally tearing down posters of Israeli hostages currently being held by the Palestinian terror group Hamas, with others praising those who did.
Some protestors even compared the surge in anti-Israeli sentiment to the Arab Spring of 2011, in which Twitter and Facebook galvanized protesters to take on regimes across the Middle East.
“I think social media has played a role, you saw the same thing with the Arab spring,” 30-year-old Sebastian Grant, said. “That started a swell 10 years ago and you’re seeing the same thing now.”
Meanwhile, 25-year-old Joana Sa Dias told the New York Post that the content she has seen on Instagram “opened my eyes.”
“I’m literally going on Instagram hour to hour to see the updates,” she said.
While pro-Israel videos exist on TikTok, they appear to be less popular than the pro-Palestinian videos on the Chinese app, with the top result for the search phrase “stand with Palestine” having been viewed nearly 3 billion times as of October 26, the Post reported.
Meanwhile, the top result for “stand with Israel” was only viewed a little over 200 million times.
Anti-Israel influencers have also gained a stronger following since the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack that left more than 1,400 Israelis dead, and also involved rape, bodies being set on fire, and kidnappings.
Among these anti-Israel influencers is 19-year-old Calla Walsh of Cambridge, Massachusetts, who encourages her followers to tear down hostage posters. She has garnered 158 million views on TikTok for her videos.
Walsh told the Post that the rapes Hamas committed in Israel on October 7 didn’t happen.
As Breitbart New reported, TikTok, owned by a hostile foreign nation, has already shown itself to be be meddling in other country’s business, a national security threat, as well as a danger to teens and kids.
Read more at the New York Post here.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.