December 8, 2023 - 7:00pm
During Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley stated that “we really do need to ban TikTok once and for all.” She justified her proposal with an alarming claim: “for every 30 minutes that someone watches TikTok every day, they become 17% more antisemitic.” This can’t possibly be true, can it?
It would seem not. Haley was referring to a recent survey analysed by Anthony Goldbloom and colleagues. In the survey, 1,323 Americans aged 18–29 were asked about their use of social media, and their views of Jews and Israel. The researchers created a measure of antisemitic/anti-Israel views, and then compared individuals who use TikTok at least 30 minutes per day to those who don’t use the platform.
They found that those who use the platform at least 30 minutes per day were 17% more likely to hold antisemitic/anti-Israel views. In other words, they did not find that people become 17% more antisemitic for every 30 minutes they spend on TikTok — which would imply that they become twice as antisemitic after just two and a half hours.
In addition, the researchers found that individuals who use Instagram and X at least 30 minutes per day were only 6% and 2% more likely to hold antisemitic/anti-Israel views than non-users. They took this as evidence that TikTok is particularly conducive to the promotion of such views. The platform, Goldbloom writes, is “creating a dangerous environment for Jews”.
While Haley’s claim was clearly based on a misunderstanding, the findings themselves also raise suspicions. Taken literally, a 17% difference between two groups on a measure of antisemitic/anti-Israel views is extremely small. It means that if 10% of non-users hold such views, the figure for users is 11.7%. What Goldbloom presumably meant to say is “17 percentage points”, which would equate to a figure of 27% for users in this example.
I obtained the raw survey data and analysed it myself. The survey contains six items for antisemitic views, each measured on a seven-point scale from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree” (e.g. “Jewish people talk about the Holocaust just to further their political agenda”). I created an index from these six items by averaging them (after reverse-coding three). Since Haley referred specifically to antisemitism, I ignored the items for anti-Israel views.
The overall level of antisemitism in the sample was low. Only 11.5% of respondents scored higher than 4 on my index — the midpoint of the scale for measuring each item. And among TikTok users, the figure was only slightly higher at 13.2%. In fact, TikTok users’ average score was 3 — indicating disagreement with antisemitism rather than neutrality or agreement.
Yet when I standardised the index, I found that TikTok users indeed scored significantly higher than non-users (almost half a standard deviation higher). And this difference became only slightly smaller when controlling for age, sex, race, education and religion. I then ran the same multivariate models for Instagram and X, respectively. The difference for X was about half as big as the one for TikTok, while the difference for Instagram was small and non-significant.
Of course, my analysis does not establish causality. It’s possible that factors other than the ones mentioned above explain why TikTok users (and, to a lesser extent, X users) score higher on antisemitism than non-users.
Haley was clearly mistaken. But there may be some truth to the claim that TikTok is making young Americans less likely to disagree with antisemitism. At this point, further research is needed.
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SubscribeYet Media Matters smears Twitter for being antisemtic and uses it to lead an advertising boycott. That advertisers buy into this clearly partisan hit job is even more pathetic.
The author does find a statistically significant correlation even if this is lost in the large bag of words this article is – only thing lacking is causality which I don’t think is that important to make the point.
Whether it is or isn’t making people antisemitic is irrelevant. Even antisemitic or white supremacist views are protected by freedom of speech so long as they do not advocate violence or other criminal acts. This just tells me that Nikki Haley is who I thought she was, a uniparty stooge that favors the same big government social engineering and information control that everybody in the government and the MSM has been slavering for since the Internet was invented. They would very much like to reverse the democratization of information if they could, and they’ll use whatever excuse they think people might buy. In this case, Haley tries to appeal to right wing voters who are more pro-Israel, but I could see a Democrat making a similar argument using racism or misogyny to ban some platform or another.
The only possible reason to ban TikTok is because the CCP almost certainly has access to the information and uses it to gather information on Americans. Whether they can actually learn anything useful from that social media data and use it against America in any way is a separate question. Does Tiktok even bill users? If they do then there’s maybe some financial data worth protecting. Beyond that, I have no idea how anyone could learn anything of value from social media. It’s mostly utter drek, cat videos and what not, regardless of the platform.
The only possible reason to ban TikTok is because the CCP almost certainly has access to the information and uses it to gather information on Americans.
This strikes me as a very good reason.
What information do you think the Chinese government could get from ByteDance that would be a threat? The whole point of TikTok and other social media is to make things people post public. It’s there for all to see. No secrets.
That’s not the information it might be gathering. Who was watching what; where were they and when; who responded to whom. All very very interesting.
How so? Doesn’t seem interesting, or valuable in any way, to me.
Presumably it wouldn’t.
As with any such service, if is offered to you for free then you (or all the data that is collected about you) is the commodity that is being sold.
It is a valid and logically coherent reason that doesn’t rely on collectivist mental gymnastics about possible causes of undesirable macro level outcomes at least. It may be a really good reason. I just don’t know what data there actually is that could be useful. Perhaps someone who understands the tech better could educate me on what the real risks are. I admit to not knowing enough to make a firm judgement.
Haley’s contention sounds and looks like bit of ‘stretch’ doesn’t it.
But there are other good reasons to be concerned about TikTok. Fact CCP essentially run it a big one. Then there is the emerging research and evidence compiled by likes of Jonathan Haidht about the damage caused by smart technology and social media especially to kids and adolescents. He cites TikTok as one to be v wary of.
This kind of “research” is junk science. It’s fodder for politicians but worthless for use as a base of public policy. That people write articles like this one bothers me. They dignify sloppy research and sloppy thinking and thus perpetuate it. That’s the last thing we need more of.
Reminds me of the flowchart P.J. O’Rourke created which proved that putting fluoride in the water supply turns young people into Communists.
That is one scary photo.
The simply answer is that the public and higher education system is fostering such modern Marxist attitudes, disturbingly scapegoating the Jewish community for the failure of the old Left Hegelian ideology.
In The Weekend Australian newspaper on 09/12/23:
Australian Tech entrepreneur Anthony Goldboom has taken on TikTok for amplifying pro Palestine posts to 100s of millions of users and fuel anti-Semitism. Mr Goldbloom analysed social media platforms on the amount of content they are displaying in relation to support for Israel and Palestine since the October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas militants.
Mr Goldbloom, who is Jewish, said he was shocked that American based uses of TikTok was seeing 54 times more pro Palestine posts than pro Israel, content this month up from 36 times more early last month. For Australian based users of Tik-Tok, the ratio was about 60:1 in favour of Palestine, he said.
Wake up everyone.
Tik Tok is playing you.
And Tik-Tok is run by……
I’m skeptical of Anthony Goldbloom’s numbers.
Maybe people with more anti-semitic views, or more conspiratorial/anti-establishment views, are more likely to use TikTok, but TikTok doesn’t encourage those views, or even try to attract those people. Maybe it suggests a willingness to mindlessly watch videos online, and they also see anti-emitic content elsewhere online.
I don’t know, but the data poses more questions than it answers.
TikTok is brain rot. So is Twitter. But TT is owned by the CCP. Ban TT and ban mobile phones for under 18s.
“But there may be some truth to the claim that TikTok is making young Americans less likely to disagree with antisemitism. At this point, further research is needed.”
Some of the negative comments seem to ignore these two sentences. Being “less likely to disagree” with the antisemitism inherent in the oppressed/oppressor dichotomy that’s been taught for decades now is at least as problematic as being overtly antisemitic.
Another big reason to worry about the negative consequences of heavy use of TikTok is that the Chinese have recognized the damage that can do and provide only a very controlled version in China and with a 40 minutes per day usage limit.
My disagreement with this article focuses on those two sentences.
First, I don’t see any sign of a mechanism that would cause TikTok users to be anti-Jew. This article focuses on correlation only, as does the statistical analysis that prompted it. No attempt is made to use the tools of causal inference. Speculation based solely on correlation should be avoided. It’s misleading.
Second, further research would not help. What evidence could it uncover?
Finally, the Chinese government does not shy away from social engineering. I’m not sure that’s such a good thing. I prefer that the government leave me alone to live my own life. If I want to waste my time writing comments like this one, so be it. Arguing with strangers on the internet is a freedom that deserves protection.
Just look at the protests at universities, and the bulk of them are pro-Palestine ,and you can see that ignorant young people are anti-Semitic. Chasing Jewish students that have to hide in libraries and a Stanford professor telling Jewish students to stand in the corner of the classroom, so they can be yelled are just a few examples. Young people (American ) no longer learn about the Holocaust,. For God’s sake, 25 percent of Dutch youth think the Holocaust is a myth. They are ignorant of the history of Israel and Palestinians. Oh, don’t forget the huge crowd of Australians chanting, “gas the Jews.” The Palestinian scarves used as fashion accessories show that they understand nothing. The members of Hamas are animals who use their own people as cannon fodder. Netanyahu seems to think killing innocent children is a great way to find the terrorists. Neither one is innocent.