We’ve seen contagions induced by social media before. But the sudden popularity of TikTok videos in which confused young people muse on the merits of Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” reveal the depths of this particular app’s ability to corrupt young minds.
Yes, that would be the deranged and paranoid thoughts of the terrorist mastermind of the murderous Sept. 11 attacks. On TikTok, you can find folks wondering aloud if he might just have had a point. The stupidity and ignorance of history boggles the mind.
Voices on the left, such as National Public Radio, have tried to argue that the TikTok problem is overblown and white supremacists are the real problem when it comes to rising antisemitism.
And, indeed, there is a growing amount of that poison on the far-right fringes.
But the left also has to recognize that antisemitism has re-emerged in troubling ways within its core communities, taking parents, ill-prepared college campuses and even some media organizations by surprise.
Denying it exists is not the solution. Rather, it’s time for good people of all political stripes to admit that some Jewish young people are being very poorly protected, despite the colossal campus infrastructure created in recent years to attend to “inclusion” and students’ mental and physical health.
To say those bureaucracies have been slow to react to what even nonpolitical Jewish students have been feeling as their sense of personal security has been upended, and the pressures they’ve faced on America’s campuses in recent weeks, is to grossly understate.
No wonder many Jewish donors are incensed.
TikTok, in particular, has become such a cesspool of antisemitism that some Jewish parents have taken to social media themselves to say that the app is traumatizing their teenagers, thanks to the current force-fed diet of lightning videos twisting Michael Jackson’s “They Don’t Care About Us,” offers of support for jihadism against the West, and even setting the thoughts of the Ayatollah Khamenei to sympathetic music.
“TikTok risks turning a whole generation into antisemites,” wrote British columnist Jake Wallis Simons, adding that the app is “torturing” his Jewish daughter. “This is moral and intellectual vacuity,” Simons wrote, “an internet brain-rot arising from a propaganda mechanism the like of which the world has never seen.”
How much of what TikTok serves us has to do with Chinese interests and how much it follows from the dangers of its famously effective and amoral algorithm is a contested matter.
But this we know to be true.
When we see the scrawled word “Nazis” defacing the fence of former Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s longtime summer home in Michigan, there is reason to worry. As our former colleague turned political influencer David Axelrod noted on X, formerly Twitter, on Monday morning: “It’s despicable. It’s disgusting. It’s just one more flashing red light.”
Like Axelrod, we see those same lights flashing everywhere. It behooves the adults in the room, those who understand the lessons of history, to intervene.
Some have suggested that Thanksgiving dinner should be free of political conversation this year, especially vis-a-vis the Middle East. We suggest that some at the table work on their listening skills when it comes to family members with experience and context.