Growing Calls to Ban TikTok After Osama Bin Laden Letter to America Goes Viral

Osama bin Laden (L) sits with his adviser Ayman al-Zawahiri (R), an Egyptian linked to the al Qaeda terrorist group, during an interview with Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir (not pictured) in an image supplied by Dawn newspaper on Nov. 10, 2001. Hamid Mir/Editor/Ausaf Newspaper for Daily Dawn/Handout via Reuters

A Republican lawmaker suggested that the U.S. ban social media app TikTok after videos showed people showing sympathy for a letter written by slain terrorist leader Osama bin Laden amid the Israel–Hamas conflict.

The al-Qaeda leader sent a letter to the United States in 2002, months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that launched a U.S. war against Islamic terror group. He specifically made mention of the United States’ longstanding support of Israel, which drew praise from TikTok users in widely shared videos—with at least one person saying that bin Laden’s letter “was right.”

In one video with about 1 million views, a TikTok user claimed that “everything we learned about the Middle East, 9/11, and ‘terrorism’ was a lie.” However, some on social media have criticized the trend and said al-Qaeda and bin Laden were, in part, responsible for the deaths of 3,000 Americans during the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) said that those praising bin Laden’s letter “are, of course, massive idiots.”

“I just came from watching the footage that the Israeli Embassy compiled about the Oct. 7 attack. It is horrific,” he told the Washington Examiner. “You are seeing Salafi jihadists, Hamas in this case, but al Qaeda was a Salafi Jihadist organization, kill babies, behead innocent civilians with garden hoes. These images are very disturbing and show the true face of evil.”

The Republican lawmaker added that the incident shows it is “further evidence that we need to ban TikTok or force a sale before ... the Chinese Communist Party checkmates the free world by controlling the dominant media platform in America that can spread this dangerous, disgusting nonsense. It is time for a ban or forced sale before it is too late.” He was referring to ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, having reportedly close ties with the ruling CCP in China.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) told the New York Post that the videos show “how China-owned TikTok is pushing pro-terrorist propaganda to influence Americans,” adding that “TikTok must be banned or sold to an American company.”

The bin Laden letter, which has been on left-wing newspaper The Guardian’s website since the early 2000s, blames Israel for provoking the Muslim world to commit terrorist attacks against the West. It also claimed that the American people, by way of voting, have “affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians,” among other statements.

Over the years, there have been calls and attempts to ban TikTok or force ByteDance to sell the app, citing its close proximity to the CCP and questions over whether the app can be used to spread propaganda to younger Americans. Nepal recently banned TikTok, citing what officials described was a disruption to “social harmony” in the Himalayan country that shares a border with communist China. Other countries, like India, have also blocked the app.

This week, as the letter again went viral on different platforms, The Guardian deleted the page from its website. The British paper said the letter lacked “the full context” and directed readers to a news article that “originally contextualized it” instead.

In May 2011, the al-Qaeda leader was killed during a U.S. special operations raid at his compound in Pakistan.

A TikTok spokesperson told news outlets that videos promoting the bin Laden letter violates its rules on supporting “any form of terrorism.”

“We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform. The number of videos on TikTok is small and reports of it trending on our platform are inaccurate,” the spokesperson said. “This is not unique to TikTok and has appeared across multiple platforms and the media.”

TikTok logo on an iPhone in London on Feb. 28, 2023. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

According to an article from Statista, about 33.7 percent of TikTok users in the United States are between the ages of 19 and 25, while users aged 18 and younger accounted for about 20 percent. It noted that users aged 46 and older only represent about 4 percent of the platform’s base, while the rest are younger.

Charlie Winter, a jihadist researcher at intelligence platform ExTrac, told The Washington Post Thursday that the letter is “a kind of core doctrinal text” for the al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorist groups. He added that the letter contains “blatant language that is clearly calling for acts of genocide, clearly calling for or justifying indiscriminate acts of violence against civilians, clear justifications for killing noncombatants in any nation that is democratic and is fighting against a Muslim-majority state.”

“It’s not the letter that is going viral. It’s a selective reading of parts of the letter that’s going viral,” he added to the paper. “And I don’t know whether it’s because people aren’t actually reading it or, when they’re reading it, they’re reading the bits that they want to see or, you know, the bits that they want to see are sinking in.”