TikTok is a national security threat to the USA, but not because of the Chinese or Russians

After championing bin Laden's "Letter to America," it's pretty clear that we have met the enemy, and he is us

Nov 18, 2023

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Have I ever told you about my love for inane content warnings? You know, before your show starts, words appear on the screen warning that the following contains sexual situations, smoking, violence, et al? I like it when they warn you that your show contains “language.” The horror. The film Nebraska contains “some language,” apparently. My favorite is when something has “pervasive language.” Language for days, my friend, words and even paragraphs as far as the eye can see. Good lord, when they’re not talking, they’re reading.

I wish the news had content warnings these days. Though what would have prepared me for reading about members of congress screening a video prepared by Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee? He compiled a video of Hamas’ attack on Israel.

McCaul [said] that the “worst” footage was not included in the screening. McCaul said that included a baby being ripped “out of a mother’s womb before her eyes, and killing her child before they killed her.”

I feel like apologizing for putting that in there, though the Washington Post put it in the newspaper for just anyone to see. Boomers like to talk about having lost their innocence when JFK was killed or when the Pentagon Papers and Watergate proved that presidents lied. That loss of innocence seems resolutely virginal compared to the experience of reading the news now.

Maybe the Reverend Carlton Pearson was right and that Hell isn’t an afterlife but what people do to each other right here on Earth. How do you slap a trigger warning on that paradigm-altering insight? What words warn you that you’re about to find out that you’re in Hell? No wonder sleep-deprived billionaires think we’re all in a simulation. The brain will do anything to protect the host from an unpleasant reality.

My brain did not protect me from what happened next.

By the time it crossed my desk, Osama bin Laden’s comeback had been percolating for days. On Monday, a TikTok account with a negligible following rediscovered his “Letter to the American people …, specifically those who support real change, especially the youth,” in which he blamed 9/11 and the resulting wars on:

“the devastating Jewish control of capital”
“the tyranny of the control of capital by large companies”
“pressure from capitalists with greed for black gold”
“support [of] the oppressive Israelis in their occupation of our Palestine in response to pressures on your administration by a Jewish lobby backed by enormous financial capabilities”
“lobbyists in New York and Washington”
Citizens United v FEC
“oppressive Israelis”
“the continued occupation of our land and the killing of our brothers, marking a victory for the Jewish lobby”
“Palestine has been under occupation for decades.”
“your oppression and the tyranny against us”
“support[ing] the Israelis in occupying our land and killing our brothers in Palestine”
“The United States shall pay for its arrogance with the blood of Christians and their funds.”

So, basically, it’s the “Jews and all their money” schtick dressed up as the debate-me Bernie bro who dropped out of college because he didn’t need some professor (you heard the air quotes, too, didn’t you?) telling him what to think. I mean, you can get all this knowledge for free from library books, man, not that he’s read them yet, but he’ll get around to it. Say what you will about bin Laden, the madman knew his audience.

Oh, and what did he propose as a policy solution? From the river to the sea, an Islamic Palestine without Jews.

If you want a real settlement that guarantees your security in your country and safeguards your economy from being depleted in a manner similar to our war of attrition against the Soviet Union, then you have to implement a roadmap that returns the Palestine land to us, all of it, from the sea to the river, it is an Islamic land not subject to being traded or granted to any party.

There is a world in which that first account on TikTok recognized that they’re being fed the same antisemitic propaganda that bin Laden tried to foist on their Millennial elders more than a decade ago. I would love to believe there is an alternative universe in which Zoomers taught each other than Hamas is just Al Qaeda with better press and rallied for democratic change in Israel. But we do not live in that world.

On Monday, a TikTok user with 371 followers, using the screen name “_monix2,” posted a video where she read parts of Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America,” in which the late terrorist leader said his killings of nearly 3,000 Americans in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks had been justified by the United States’ support of Israel’s “occupation” of the Palestinian territories.

For a few days leftwing TikTok shared the letter approvingly with each other, saying their minds had been blown, treating the pedestrian propaganda like proof of a secret knowledge that had been kept from them.

“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,'” said TikTok user Lynette Adkins in a video posted to the platform on Tuesday, referring to the title often given to the text by bin Laden. “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.”
Commenters felt similarly awestruck by the document. “Just read it.. my eyes have been opened,” wrote one. “Read our entire existence for filth and he did NOT miss,” another said of bin Laden’s criticisms of the U.S.

This image, below, is where I broke.

What’s the trigger warning for this?

For TikTok, the #lettertoamerica hashtag wasn’t a big deal. By Wednesday it had only been seen about 2 million times. For reference, that’s more people than watch Fox News in the evening and three times as many as subscribe to The New York Times print edition. It wasn’t a big deal for TikTok. People who have since criticized coverage that said #lettertoamerica went viral are missing the larger point. Sure, skincare tips and cat videos dominated bin Laden. But TikTok is so huge that a little went a long, long way.

That night a journalist posted a compilation of Zoomers reacting to bin Laden’s “Letter to America.” His post drew 38 million views, boosting the online conversation still further and drawing the attention of national and international publications.

The British newspaper The Guardian had posted the letter on its website as a historical artifact, which is where the Gen Z TikTokkers discovered it. Worried that they were unwittingly contributing to the endorsement of a terrorist’s manifesto, they took the letter down, which pro-Palestine TikTok took as censorship. TikTok and X, the site formerly known as Twitter and where #lettertoamerica had spilled over into, began suppressing the conversation for similar reasons (promoting terrorism being notably violative of even Elon Musk’s user guidelines), eliciting similar reactions (censorship!).

It wasn’t a big deal for TikTok, but TikTok is so huge that a little went a long, long way.

I want to stop for a second to give those of us who are old enough to have experienced 9/11 a second to feel this. My best friend from high school was in Manhattan that day. That day is the reason my friend Jake’s wife doesn’t have a mother. I know more people who served in uniform in the post-9/11 wars than I can count. My wife and many friends were active in the evacuation of interpreters and their families from Afghanistan. I once hired an Afghan man who had to get his family out of Kabul because the Taliban wanted to murder him for the sin of being a performing musician. I know we screwed up our response to 9/11, but to see young Americans take bin Laden’s side on 9/11 causes pain mixed with a dizzying “the call is coming from inside the house” fear.

OK, got all that? Our 9/11 lived experience did not prepare us for a generation to take the side of the rapists against the women, the hijackers against the Falling Man. It’s a lot to take in, and I don’t like feeling this way, but we have accept it so we can let this feeling go so we can answer the big, important question.

If your first reaction is “What the f*ck?” you owe it to yourself to actually answer the question. To get there, though, I need to radically change my thinking about what news is. I’m Gen X. I get up every day and read the news. I go to the Washington Post and The New York Times websites. I read newsletters from accredited journalists. My friends often text each other links to articles from magazines and news sites to read. At work, placing an op-ed in the local daily newspaper is considered a big deal. We even celebrate favorable letters to the editor.

That’s not what they talk about when they talk about news.

And none of this matters to Gen Z. To paraphrase Raymond Carver, that’s not what they talk about when they talk about news.

The news isn’t where they consume news. They don’t go to washingtonpost.com, they open TikTok. Since 2020, news consumption through TikTok has almost doubled, and this increase is being driven overwhelmingly by Gen Z, less so by Millennials. A third of Americans under 30 get their news from TikTok, and these people are disproportionately Hispanic and Black women who vote Democratic.

The logical thing for the legacy news media to do is to cross-platform their news onto TikTok, but — ha, ha! — that’s not what Gen Z wants. According to the most recent Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, these folks don’t want news from the newsies.

When it comes to news, audiences say they pay more attention to celebrities, influencers, and social media personalities than journalists in networks like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. This contrasts sharply with Facebook and Twitter, where news media and journalists are still central to the conversation.

Millennials were the first to prefer getting their news from social networking sites, but back then (oh, those halcyon days B.D.T.) they fed on recommendations from trusted friends and contacts. Now, Zoomers want and are getting their news not from Dan Rather but randos such as celebrities, influencers, and social media personalities, few if any of whom have any training in reporting. These people are incentivized to engage and convince rather than inform and educate. It’s a recipe to indoctrinate a generation to seek the hidden truths that they don’t want you to know — even if the only reason you didn’t know is that we never thought we needed to tell you that bin Laden was not just the bad guy who killed thousands of people, but he was wrong about the Jews.

Congress has worried officially that TikTok is a national security threat because the Chinese military, acting through ByteDance, could use the tracking pixels that TikTok places on users to gather information about Americans. And business professor Scott Galloway has called for banning the app in the U.S. because it would be too easy for a malicious foreign actor, e.g. Russia or China, to sow discord by influencing the discourse.

Imagine a brain jack inserted into the neural network of two-thirds of our youth under the age of 25 who spend more time on TikTok than any other media source combined, and then imagine how easy it would be to put your thumb on the scale of anti-American content and recognize that they would be stupid not to elegantly, insidiously, covertly raise a generation of American civic, nonprofit, military, government leaders who, day by day minute by minute, just feel a little shittier about America. If we had that tool in China, we would do the exact same thing. This is a defense threat.

But why would Russia or China ever bother when we so easily do this to ourselves?

The challenge for the news media is a marketing one, that is, how to make itself relevant to and desired by Generation Z. We’ve never needed proper journalism more, and the ones who need it the most have never wanted it less. This isn’t a problem with journalism but with the business that underpins it.

If there is one thing that distinguishes American business interests above all else — the thing that truly makes America AMERICA! — it’s being able not just to sell someone what they don’t need but to make them feel like they will be incomplete and undesirable if they even hesitate to reach for their wallets.

Influencers, enjoy your last days in the halo lamps. Social media personalities, you can f*ck right off. We never wanted you in the first place. After soulless American business leaders have picked up the scent of potential profits — that is, found a viable growth model for the news media and solved the marketing puzzle for Gen Z — victory is inevitable. If the kids want the truth, baby, have you met my friend the fact checker? As the lady once said, the truth shall set you free, but first it will piss you off. It’s all over but the self-loathing. America, let’s get horny for hard copy and libidinous for ledes. Journalism is bringing sexy back.

Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Threads at @jasonstanford, or email him at jason31170@gmail.com.