Young users fed hate
"For every view of a TikTok video with a pro-Israel hashtag in the US, there are 54 views of videos with pro-Palestinian hashtags," says Anthony Goldbloom.
Jewish Australian tech entrepreneur Anthony Goldbloom is spearheading a campaign in the USA called TikToxic, which aims to draw attention to the disproportionate amount of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel content on TikTok.
A survey carried out by Goldbloom, who is the founder of data science company Kaggle acquired by Google in 2017, along with a group of tech leaders suggests TikTok is a “meaningful driver of a surge in antisemitism”. The survey also suggests that TikTok – which has over one billion monthly users – is shaping anti-Israel views among 18-to-29-year-olds.
Goldbloom went public last week with a post drawing on survey evidence that young users of TikTok in the US are 17 per cent more likely to harbour antisemitic views (compared with 6 per cent on Instagram and 2 per cent on X). His post has been viewed over three million times and his accompanying graph has been posted by Elon Musk and now has over 30 million views.
“TikTok users are more likely to believe Jewish people are dishonest in business, are disloyal to America, and have too much power in the media. They are also more likely to disagree that Israel has a right to defend itself against those who want to destroy it,” Goldbloom said.
“This is not surprising when you consider that for every view of a TikTok video with a pro-Israel hashtag in the US, there are 54 views of videos with pro-Palestinian hashtags. In fact, FreePalestine is currently one of the top-performing hashtags across all of TikTok.”
Goldbloom, now chief executive of data platform start-up Sumble and based in San Francisco, has held meetings with top executives at TikTok, with the company recently announcing it is planning a social media campaign called “Swipe Out Hate”.
According to reports, the campaign aims to defuse growing complaints that antisemitism and other hate speech has increased in videos about the war in Israel.
TikTok has said that while hashtags like #standwithIsrael may be associated with fewer videos than #freePalestine, the former has 68 per cent more views per video in the US, meaning more people are seeing the content.
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