TikTok bans videos promoting Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’
- Social media users rediscovered Bin Laden’s 2002 letter amid heated online debate over Israel’s war in Gaza
- TikTok says content promoting the letter ‘clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism’
TikTok will prohibit content that promotes Osama bin Laden’s 2002 letter detailing the former al-Qaeda leader’s justifications for attacks against Americans, the short-form video app said.
Discussions of the 20-year-old letter have spread on the platform this week in the context of debate over the Israel-Hamas war, with some users in the West praising its contents.
The letter, which was written after al-Qaida’s attack on the United States that killed nearly 3,000 people, criticised US support for Israel, accused Americans of financing “oppression” of Palestinians, and contained antisemitic comments.
Bin Laden was killed in 2011 in Pakistan by a US military special operations unit.
“Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism,” TikTok said in a statement on Thursday, adding that reports that it was “trending” on the platform were inaccurate.
The origin of the trend has been pinned by various media outlets on a video posted Tuesday by a TikTok influencer with 12 million likes on her profile.
Al-Qaeda leader circulates video, dispelling rumours of his death
“I need everyone to stop what they’re doing right now and go read – it’s literally two pages – go read ‘A Letter to America’,” the influencer wrote.
“Come back here and let me know what you think. Because I feel like I’m going through like an existential crisis right now, and a lot of people are. So I just need someone else to be feeling this too.”
A search for “Letter to America” on TikTok surfaced no results on Thursday, with a notice that said the phrase may be associated with “content that violates our guidelines”.
Some US lawmakers have called for a ban of the Chinese-owned app and had renewed their criticisms before Thursday’s announcement.
Democratic congressman Josh Gottheimer said on Wednesday on X, formerly Twitter, that TikTok was “pushing pro-terrorist propaganda to influence Americans”.
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement on Thursday: “There is never a justification for spreading the repugnant, evil, and antisemitic lies that the leader of al-Qaeda issued just after committing the worst terrorist attack in American history”.
On Wednesday, The Guardian removed the full text of bin Laden’s letter, which it had published in 2002. The news outlet said on its website that the letter was being shared on social media without full context, and that it would instead direct readers to the news article that originally reported on the letter.
TikTok said previously its recommendation algorithm does not push certain content to users, and that the company has removed hundreds of thousands of videos since October 7 for violating policies against misinformation and promotion of violence.
It is difficult to gain a full understanding of how prevalent certain content is on TikTok, partly because external researchers have limited access to its data, said Renee DiResta, a research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse
