Dozens of young Americans have posted videos on TikTok this week expressing sympathy with Osama bin Laden, the notorious terrorist who orchestrated the September 11 attacks, for a two-decade-old letter he wrote critiquing the United States, including its government and support of Israel.
The letter, which attempts to justify the targeting and killing of American civilians, was first published in 2002. It began to recirculate this week on the social media platform, and videos on the topic had garnered at least 14 million views by Thursday. Many of the videos, which supported some of Bin Ladens assertions and urged other users to read the letter, were shared in the wider context of criticism of American support for Israel in its ongoing war against Hamas.
TikTok said on Thursday that videos promoting the letter violate its rules against supporting any form of terrorism. The company said the number of videos promoting the letter were small and added reports of it trending on our platform are inaccurate.
TikTok declined to provide specific data to support this assertion.
TikTok is hugely popular with young Americans, with a majority of Americans under 30 using the app at least once a week, according to a KFF survey. Many of TikToks users were born after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks when 19 men hijacked commercial airliners, intentionally crashed the planes, and killed nearly 3,000 people in New York City, Washington, DC, and rural Pennsylvania. The attack was orchestrated by Bin Laden, the former leader of the al Qaeda terrorist group who was killed in a US special forces raid in 2011.
TikToks design makes it difficult to precisely measure how popular or widespread a sentiment is on the platform, but an initial CNN review found a few dozen videos overtly praising or sympathizing with the sentiments expressed in the letter, which is titled Letter to America.
Many of the videos were shared with the hashtag #lettertoamerica. By Thursday, views of those videos had exceeded 14 million, yet some videos were from users expressing frustration and disgust about the letter and how it was being praised by others on the platform.
In one video no longer available on the platform that had been viewed more than 1.6 million times, a New York-based lifestyle influencer encouraged others to read the letter and said, if you have read it, let me know if you are also going through an existential crisis in this very moment, because in the last 20 minutes, my entire viewpoint on the entire life I have believed, and I have lived, has changed.
The video was later removed. CNN has reached out to the user for comment.
In another video viewed more than 100,000 times, a TikTok user who regularly posts criticisms of the American government said of the letter, If were going to call Osama bin Laden a terrorist, so is the American government.
A White House spokesman slammed the apparent online trend in a statement, calling it an insult to the victims of the 9/11 terror attacks.
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 highlighting them as his direct motivation for murdering 2,977 innocent Americans, deputy press secretary Andrew Bates told CNN.
No one should ever insult the 2,977 American families still mourning loved ones by associating themselves with the vile words of Osama bin Laden, Bates added, particularly now, at a time of rising antisemitic violence in the world, and just after Hamas terrorists carried out the worst slaughter of the Jewish people since the Holocaust in the name of the same conspiracy theories.
Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, explained that TikTok incentivizes high engagement at all costs. The platform is utterly ruthless about whether it uses hate, disinformation, or positive content to keep you addicted. As such, the smart takes arent the ones that succeed. It is the dumb takes that get the most virality on a platform like TikTok.
Ahmed, who has been studying the rise of conspiracy theories among young people, told CNN that TikTok claims to be an entertainment machine but is really an indoctrination machine. Right now, we have no visibility nor any control over the algorithms that are shaping the minds of young people in America today, he explained.
The letter itself is a broad critique of American foreign policy that is also filled with antisemitic tropes and even repeats the conspiracy theory that AIDS was a Satanic American Invention.
There is a particular focus on US support for Israel. It brings us both laughter and tears to see that you have not yet tired of repeating your fabricated lies that the Jews have a historical right to Palestine, it reads.
Peter Bergen, a CNN National Security Analyst who produced the first television interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997, said he finds the virality of the letter puzzling.
Most of the people were either not born or were very young children when Bin Laden and 9/11 happened, so they dont have much historical context.
Bergen, who has written several books on the deceased terrorist, remains skeptical of the letters origin. Theres no proof it was written by bin Laden and some of the things that he focuses on are inconsistent with his other writings, he told CNN.
On Wednesday, The Guardian newspaper, which first published a translated copy of the letter in 2002, removed it from its website after TikTok users linked directly to the document. In a statement, the newspaper said the letter published on our website 20 years ago has been widely shared on social media without the full context. Therefore we have decided to take it down and direct readers to the news article that originally contextualized it instead.
The letter, however, is still available elsewhere online.
New data from the Pew Research Center released Wednesday shows TikTok is rapidly becoming a place where more and more young Americans get their news.
Nearly a third of Americans ages 18-29 regularly get news from TikTok, according to Pew and overall, the share of US adults who say they regularly get their news from TikTok has quadrupled from 3% in 2020 to 14% in 2023.
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But as social media researchers pored over publicly available data on just how widespread the bin Laden content has been on TikTok, one thing became clear: the videos do not appear to have ever gone viral.
There were fewer than 300 videos using the hashtag #lettertoamerica that garnered around 2 million views by Wednesday, according to TikTok, a platform with an estimated 1.6 billion monthly active users. For comparison, a recent 24-hour period on the platform had 200 million videos using #GymTok and #travel videos racked up 137 million.
Yet after a tweet on Thursday afternoon from social media influencer Yashar Ali went viral on the platform formerly known as Twitter rounding up some of the videos, the number of views on the #lettertoamerica hashtag jumped to 13 million. That sent TikTok rushing to remove content related to the manifesto. In cracking down on the posts, TikTok even began suppressing videos that were criticizing those who were endorsing bin Laden's hateful writing. The frenzy over the videos prompted moral panic among lawmakers and other observers over the idea that TikTok was radicalizing young people and amplifying the writing of a terrorist, according to Jared Holt, senior research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
"This story speaks to how far there still is to go in boosting social media literacy and how susceptible everyone is to information disorder and suggestion," Holt told NPR. "Even those who might consider themselves people trying to speak truth against falsehoods are not immune. Next year's election cycle is sure to be gasoline on these longstanding faults."
It'd be liking making a topic on CE where you said "Remember When People on Twitter were Sympathetic to Adolf Hitler" except you'd have to do it every day because that's how much that type of content on Twitter daily dwarfs the size of videos about Osama that were ever on tiktok.
It's poor reporting that distorts public perception & understanding and is very likely one element that pushed lawmakers forward with the tiktok ban despite US based social medias like Twitter and Facebook having much bigger hate speech footprints.
It'd be liking making a topic on CE where you said "Remember When People on Twitter were Sympathetic to Adolf Hitler" except you'd have to do it every day because that's how much that type of content on Twitter daily dwarfs the size of videos about Osama that were ever on tiktok.
It's poor reporting that distorts public perception & understanding and is very likely one element that pushed lawmakers forward with the tiktok ban despite US based social medias like Twitter and Facebook having much bigger hate speech footprints.
So you agree that Twitter and Facebook should be banned too, right?
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No matter what platform you go on you can find some rando terminally online lunatic saying whatever you want. This is so completely non-news.
What matters is how many people and who in power is saying shit. This is why people roll their eyes at people who complain about "left wing extremists" and conflate them with right wing extremists.
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The commercial says that Church isn't for perfect people, I guess that's why I'm an atheist.
Remember when people on GameFAQs were sympathetic to Dylann Roof? It was like 3 people but as a percentage of population it's basically everyone compared to this dumb shit. Do you want to ban GameFAQs?
In what way is the claim "people on TikTok were sympathetic to Bin Laden" exaggerated?
Because it's a drop in the fuckin' bucket of a massive userbase and all you're doing is seeking something to be outraged about. AKA terminally online syndrome. I get that that's your gimmick but let it go.