The TikTok Panic Reached a New Level of Stupidity at Last Night's GOP Debate

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley claimed in the fourth GOP debate on Wednesday that for every 30 minutes a person spends watching TikTok, an app used by millions of Americans every day, they become 17 percent more antisemitic. 

The former South Carolina governor also said that 50 percent of young people thought Hamas was “warranted with what they did with Israel,” and that to combat this, TikTok needed to be banned. 

“We really do need to ban TikTok once and for all, and let me tell you why,” Haley said. “For every 30 minutes that someone watches TikTok every day, they become 17 percent more antisemitic, more pro-Hamas based on doing that. We now know that 50 percent of adults 18 to 25 think that Hamas was warranted with what they did with Israel. That’s a problem.” 

Haley appeared to be referencing a survey conducted by Generation Lab, whose results were released last week. Data scientist Anthony Goldbloom stated in a post on X that the survey found a significant increase in “antisemitic or anti-Israel views” based on TikTok usage, as opposed to other social media. 

There is no denying that antisemitism is a real problem in the U.S., and the world. This was true before Hamas’ October 7 attack. However, there’s a few things worth noting about the survey, the underlying data of which was posted online. First, it only polled roughly 1,300 people online, not all of whom even use TikTok. This is an infinitesimally small fraction of the social network’s user base. The questions also included things like whether respondents felt comfortable spending time with people who openly support Israel, whether Israel is a bad influence on our democracy, or whether Israel “is right” to defend itself against “those who want to destroy it.” While responses to these questions may be anti-Israel, they are not necessarily antisemitic. Moreover, the survey contained results such as people who reported never using TikTok saying, for example, that the holocaust was fake or exaggerated.

Overall, the survey’s ability to speak to wider trends on TikTok is doubtful. Even if the finding that people who spend more time on TikTok tend to hold more antisemitic views was accurate, it does not follow that spending time on the app linearly increases a person’s level of antisemitism.

TikTok has previously been accused of promoting pro-Palestinian content in an effort by its China-based parent company ByteDance to influence American public opinion. Last month, the company responded to these allegations, saying that the algorithm was designed to show people videos similar to those they had already interacted with. 

“Attitudes among young people skewed toward Palestine long before TikTok existed,” a company press release stated, referencing Gallup polling data. “TikTok does not ‘promote’ one side of an issue over another…On TikTok, the videos people view, like, and share inform the recommendation algorithm about content they might find relevant. Using these signals, the recommendation algorithm creates a prediction score to rank videos to potentially recommend.”

Haley’s statement came in response to a question about her perspective on a Senate hearing on Tuesday, during which elite university presidents were asked whether pro-Palestinian protests on campus violated school conduct rules about antisemitism. The presidents agreed that the answer was “context-dependent.” Many politicians thought that the presidents were dodging the question, and a White House spokesperson condemned their statements on Wednesday. 

“It was disgusting to see what happened,” Haley said. “If this had been the KKK that was doing protests on those campuses, every one of those college presidents would have been up in arms.”

Haley stated that the U.S. needed to prevent colleges from accepting “foreign money,” and to change the definition of antisemitism to include anti-Zionism. The House of Representatives passed a resolution on Tuesday in which it “clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism” and condemns the slogan used by pro-Palestinian activists, “from the river to the sea,” as a “rallying cry for the eradication of the State of Israel and the Jewish people.”

Politicians, such as former president Donald Trump, have threatened to ban the app or limit its usage in certain states. Though the fourth Republican debate had spirited altercations between the four candidates on stage, no candidate responded to Haley’s comment on TikTok.