TikTok under pressure to suppress pro-Palestine voices

RELIGIONS NEWS AGENCY (REDNA) – Social media giant, TikTok, has come under pressure from pro-Israel celebrities and “Jewish influencers” crackdown on pro-Palestine voices and content, according to a shocking new report by the New York Times.

Earlier this week, executives at the company are said to have held a private meeting with around a dozen pro-Israel celebrities, included the actors Sacha Baron Cohen, Debra Messing and Amy Schumer to discuss what they called a “surge of anti-Semitism” on the platform.

However, recordings of the call obtained by the NYT reveal the reality to be quite different.

The TikTok higher-ups appear to be under huge pressure to cooperate with demands to suppress users promoting legitimate pro-Palestine speech. Participating celebrities even went so far as to equate allowing criticism of Israel to enabling Nazism.

“What is happening at TikTok is it is creating the biggest anti-Semitic movement since the Nazis,” Cohen, who does not appear to have an official TikTok account.

Among the demands made of TikTok were tighter restrictions on use of the phrase “from the river to the sea,” which supporters of the apartheid state claim is anti-Semitic, even though Israeli leaders are notorious for using the term to assert Israel’s domination over every inch of historic Palestine.

This week’s meeting with TikTok comes as the social media platform is trying to push back against growing claims that it is promoting pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel content.

Several Washington lawmakers have renewed their calls to ban the app, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, arguing that Beijing may be influencing the content promoted through the platform’s algorithms.

Earlier this year, a glimpse into the scale of Israel’s crackdown on social media users was given with the revelation that the Occupation state is one of the world’s leading countries in demanding the removal of videos from the TikTok social media platform.

According to a report in the Jerusalem Post, TikTok received 2,713 requests from governments around the world to remove or limit content or accounts in the third quarter of 2022.

The company removed 110,954,663 videos uploaded to the platform worldwide during this time, roughly one per cent of all the videos uploaded to TikTok.