Over a dozen Jewish celebrities and influencers challenged Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-linked TikTok on Wednesday over the antisemitic content proliferating on its platform, The New York Times reported.
Influencers pushed TikTok executives and personnel to take more action to tackle rising antisemitic content on the platform in a private 90-minute video call, according to the NYT, which obtained a recording of the discussion. TikTok set up the discussion with the Jewish influencers following their letter to the platform, which accused it of being unsafe for Jewish users. (RELATED: Videos Of People Sympathizing With Bin Laden’s ‘Letter To America’ Go Viral)
Respectfully, @NikkiHaley, this is the truth: Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism. We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform. The number of videos on TikTok is… https://t.co/9Onz1G4b2p
— TikTok Policy (@TikTokPolicy) November 16, 2023
The influencers on the call cited users making comments on Jewish individuals’ posts, including “Hitler was right” or “I hope you end up like Anne Frank” that TikTok did not censor, according to the NYT.
“What is happening at TikTok is it is creating the biggest antisemitic movement since the Nazis,” Actor Sacha Baron Cohen claimed early on in the discussion, according to the NYT. He criticized the violent images and perceived disinformation spreading on the app and asserted that TikTok is able to “flip a switch” to solve the antisemitism issue.
“Shame on you,” he said to TikTok Head of Operations Adam Presser, according to the NYT.
Presser and Global Head of User Operations Seth Melnick, who are also Jewish, spearheaded the call, which actors Debra Messing and Amy Schumer also attended, according to the NYT. Presser and Melnick mainly expressed agreement with the influencers.
“Obviously a lot of what Sacha says, there’s truth to that,” Presser said, according to the NYT. Presser later claimed that there is no “magic button” to solve the issue.
TikTok has faced significant criticism because of anti-Israel content spreading on the app during the Israel-Hamas War and because of its ties to the CCP. Beijing-based ByteDance is TikTok’s parent company and maintains an internal CCP committee.
“If you think back to Oct. 7, the reason why Hamas were able to behead young people and rape women was they were fed images from when they were small kids that led them to hate,” Cohen said during the discussion.
He also accused TikTok of distributing inflammatory content to the youth, according to the NYT.
TikTok took action on Thursday to stop the spread of Osama bin Laden’s 2002 letter justifying the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon after posts including it went viral Wednesday evening. Users were reading the letter on the platform and delivering positive reactions to it, posting #LetterToAmerica, journalist Christina Buttons reported on X — formerly Twitter.
“We recognize this is an incredibly difficult and fearful time for millions of people around the world and in our TikTok community,” TikTok told the NYT. “Our leadership has been meeting with creators, civil society, human rights experts and stakeholders to listen to their experiences and feedback on how TikTok can remain a place for community, discovery and sharing authentically.”
TikTok and the Jewish influencers who signed the letter to the platform did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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