Anti-Israel social media is radicalizing Western youth.
Welcome to the "TikTok Intifada," delivered by the Chinese Communist Party, amplified by the Muslim Brotherhood, and coming to a smartphone near you.
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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
An insidious war is being waged on smartphone screens across the West.
Social media platforms, particularly TikTok, have become a battleground where narratives are shaped, minds are radicalized, and the future of Western support for Israel is being systematically attacked.
On TikTok, the Chinese social media platform that U.S. President Donald Trump has banned (but not yet implemented), anti-Israel content exceeds pro-Israel content by a factor of 15 to one.1 Lies on TikTok also spread about 40 percent faster than factual content.
TikTok users are overwhelmingly young, so this has helped produce a generation of young people who believe outright lies about Israel, such as that it is an apartheid state, a colonizer, and committing genocide against the Palestinians. A quarter of them is under 20 years old, while 60 percent are under 34 years old. Most TikTok creators are aged 18 to 24 years old.
Israel’s trio of missile defense systems (Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow) may shoot down most incoming missiles, rockets, and drones, but the TikTok algorithm is another matter. The Jewish state is winning the real war spectacularly, but losing the social media and narrative wars. While Israel could do much better on the PR front, it will never win on social media.
With almost two billion Muslims globally, Israel’s foes have a huge virtual army that can shape audience views. Hamas and its sympathizers and Western apologists flood social media with lies to exploit the Repetition Bias, a heuristic in which repeated information feels more true than new or unrepeated information. False atrocity stories, doctored videos and photographs, fake data, and expressions of selective outrage spread like a California wildfire.
While it looks like just another social media platform, TikTok’s algorithms are built to push the Chinese Communist Party’s twisted worldview and agenda, which is anti-Western and anti-Israel. The Chinese Communist Party, you may recall, is one of the great mass-murdering organizations of the 20th century.
If this sounds paranoid, I would counter that paranoid is someone in possession of all the facts. Consider China’s DeepSeek AI module, which is China’s version of ChatGPT. It refuses to answer questions about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
While it has been well over a year since a failed Palestinian Islamic Jihad missile crashed into Gaza’s Al-Ahli hospital (which, true to form, the international media initially wrongly blamed on Israel), 67 percent of TikTok videos still blame Israel for the attack.2
A 2024 Washington Post investigation showed that about a quarter of viral videos about Gaza contained incorrect or misleading edits, such as photos being from other conflicts. A staggering 60 million TikTok posts carried the #FreePalestine hashtag, and stories with the #BringThemHomeNow hashtag referencing Israeli civilian hostages that Hamas is holding garnered less than five percent of that.
TikTok’s recommendation algorithm appears tailor-made for anti-Israel radicalization. A Wall Street Journal experiment showed that users who watched just one “pro-Palestine” video were fed 12 more within 30 minutes.3 Pro-Israel posts are even five times more likely to be flagged or suppressed for hate speech.4 This is absurd given how few pro-Israel posts there are relative to anti-Israel ones.
This TikTok-fueled indoctrination has instilled in people strong views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, despite them knowing almost nothing about it and having no stake in it. It is now a pathology. Ask anti-Israel protestors at a university campus or music festival to name one Israeli city west of the Jordan River, and you will see a blank look replace their face.
Data bears out this cluelessness. About 42 percent of U.S. high school students think Israel is an apartheid state, despite it being untrue.5 This is the result of deliberate misinformation and mal-education, or what the rest of us call lies and brainwashing. “Anti-Zionism” is framed as a natural extension of progressive values, even though “anti-Zionism” is today’s most common form of antisemitism.
Celebrities and influencers endorsing these anti-Israel lies make them appear more credible to impressionable young people. When someone such as Arab-American supermodel Bella Hadid posts infographics accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and other lies to her 61 million Instagram followers, her mostly teen followers absorb it uncritically. Meanwhile, pro-Israel celebrities such as Israeli actress Gal Gadot face swarms of hate mail and even boycotts.
Like all social media platforms, TikTok favors outrage, emotional manipulation, and oversimplified narratives, all of which benefit Hamas’ anti-Israel propaganda. A 10-second clip of a crying Palestinian child garners millions of likes; a two-minute Israel Defense Forces video explaining Hamas’ sick human shield strategy dies in obscurity.
As many as 70 percent of young people engage with social media based on their emotional reaction to it, not on their knowledge of the conflict or its history.6
The implications are terrifying. Israel’s Islamist enemies think in decades, generations, and even centuries. By shaping young people’s views now, they are ensuring that many of tomorrow’s leaders and voters will have anti-Israel views.
Consider the Muslim Brotherhood, the crazed Islamist Egyptian terror group that spawned Hamas. It has a 100-year plan to bring down the West by means ranging from terror and outright war, to using Muslim immigrants to change the demographics of Western states. Every time an anti-Israel demonstrator holds up a sign that reads “Globalize the Intifada,” they are doing the Muslim Brotherhood's work. Anyone who does not recognize this is in denial or an enemy of civilization.
Given that many European governments are already effectively anti-Israel, or at least they are when Leftist governments are in power as in the UK, France, and Spain (to name but a few), the biggest shift is happening in the United States. Israel has long enjoyed bipartisan support in America, but the lunatic Far-Left wing of the Democratic Party is outright hostile towards the Jewish state.
This could become the norm once today’s young Democrats move into positions of power within the party. It is already happening as the party, in response to U.S. President Donald Trump trouncing it in the last election, is tracking further left instead of back to the center.
Israel must reduce its reliance on American weaponry, manufacture more at home, and diversify its supply sources. Plans for this are underway even as Israel is benefitting from very strong support from President Trump’s administration.
As evident from Israel’s strike on Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile sites, Israel is responsible for its own defense, and can go it alone when needed. By contrast, it is increasingly fragile Western countries that are most at risk from the TikTok Intifada.
Evil Islamists and their deranged Far-Left allies care about more than just Israel. The Islamists want to destroy the West and build a Caliphate, while the Far-Left retains its usual goal of wanting to destroy the capitalist state in pursuit of some justice no one else can see and which has brought horror to every state that has tried it.
Israel must focus on winning the real war and the social media frenzy will subside for awhile. Westerners must wake up from their denial and apathy and recognize that this threat is here now, and not in some dystopian future.
The dystopia is what will happen if action is not taken now.
Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis
NewsGuard
“How TikTok Brings War Home to Your Child.” Wall Street Journal.
“State Hate: How Iran’s Press TV Uses Social Media to Promote Anti-Jewish Hatred.” Anti-Defamation League.
“Drawing the Line: How US Jewish College Students Think About Antisemitism.” Brandeis University.
“‘It’s in the Air’: Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias at Stanford, and How to Address It.” Stanford University.
2 Billion Muslims Worldwide. 52 Million Muslims in Europe. 20 years ago these numbers were 1.34 billion and 17 million respectively. So, this is literally the results of an attempt to out-number us. I was a Liberal once, and I am old enough to remember the numbers 20 years ago. I am courageous enough to say this, both to myself and to you. We live in new times and a whole new era.
Jerry: Yes, and the Muslim plan really is as clear as this. I remember reading the subliminal and deeply malevolent code for this when Muslim commentators were invited to write for the press here in the UK then. Their code is ‘the little children need somewhere to play…’ Meaning, the anchor babies will take the Land, and the Democratic countries by Demographics and having 5 children families.