At Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate, former UN Ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley attacked the Chinese social media platform, TikTok, saying, “We really do need to ban TikTok once and for all and let me tell you why. For every 30 minutes that someone watches TikTok, every day, they become 17% more antisemitic, more pro-Hamas based on doing that.”
Mainstream media fact checkers have come out in droves and attacked the former governor, saying that the statistics have been ‘flubbed,’ but was she wrong?
The answer is no – Nikki Haley was not wrong and she was in fact citing directly from the data.
The study that Gov. Haley was quoting specifically states, “Survey data suggests TikTok is a meaningful driver of the current surge in antisemitism. The survey finds that spending 30 minutes a day on TikTok increases the chances somebody holds anti-Semitic or anti-Israel views by 17%, compared with 6% for Instagram and 2% for X.”
China currently embraces a very strong anti-Israel stance, so it is understandable that a platform that was developed to help promote Chinese Communist values has an anti-Semitic influence on its users. The influence is not just impacting the users, but the employees as well. TikTok’s Jewish employees have started to speak out about an increasing hostile work environment.
BTJ has been reporting on the influence of the CCP on TikTok for several years. Every year, BTJ hosts a hacker’s conference where hackers from around the world come together to help missionaries on the field. One of the top recommendations from the Hacker’s Conference for Chinese missionaries on the field is to not use TikTok.
