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In a comment that puzzled many viewers, former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley during Wednesday’s Republican presidential candidate debate drew a linkage between TikTok usage and antisemitism.
“We really need to ban TikTok once and for all,” she said. “For every 30 minutes that someone watched TikTok, every day, they become 17% more antisemitic, more pro-Hamas,” she said.
Visually, a TikTok user’s antisemitism — if what Haley described was accurate — would grow like so, doubling in just 6.5 hours. (The power of compound interest at work!)
Many were quick to note that Haley’s daughter has a widely followed TikTok account. But the more pertinent background is that Haley isn’t accurately stating what a study found, though she wasn’t far off.
The study, a pretty decent sample of some 1,323 Americans under the age of 30, found that spending 30 minutes a day on TikTok was associated with a 17% increase in the likelihood they were to hold antisemitic or anti-Israel views compared to people who don’t use it at all. While much higher than the antisemitic views of Instagram or X users, the study does not suggest that continuing to use the Chinese-owned social media service will further bolster the user’s antisemitic views.
And of course there’s the important distinction between causation and correlation, though the study authors do note that for every video view with a pro-Israel hashtag, there are 54 with a pro-Palestinian one.
The discussion comes after a Capitol Hill hearing drew attention to the issue of campus antisemitism, and led to sharp criticism of the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT, for their unwillingness to want to discipline students who call for the genocide of Jews.
Now see: Harvard president on Hamas attack: ‘I was focused on action that weekend, not statements’
