Nikki Haley renews call for TikTok ban after Bin Laden letter circulates

Nikki Haley this week intensified her calls for the US government to ban TikTok, the Chinese social media platform, after some users criticizing the war between Israel and Hamas promoted ‘Letter to America’, a text written by Osama. bin Laden after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Ms. Haley, a Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President Donald J. Trump, argued that the document was another example of foreign adversaries using social media to spread anti-American propaganda among young people.

‘Stop giving the Chinese Communist Party the ability to influence Americans’ she wrote on X on Thursdaythe platform formerly known as Twitter uses the hashtag #BanTikTok.

In a same-day appearance on the “Guy Benson Show” On Fox News Radio, Ms. Haley blamed the app for sowing sympathy for Hamas on some college campuses and fueling anti-American views.

“I have long said we should ban TikTok, and if you didn’t know why, today is another example,” she said, referring to the letter’s circulation on the platform.

Ms Haley added that during her tenure at the United Nations she had witnessed the influence foreign powers can gain through social media, and said companies should also be required to disclose algorithmic information they use to aimed at specific target groups.

“They know this is the cheapest form of warfare,” she said.

In Bin Laden’s letter, the mastermind behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which killed nearly 3,000 people, defended the terrorists’ actions. He wrote that American taxpayers were complicit in harming Muslims in the Middle East, including destroying Palestinian homes. He also said that Americans were “servants” of the Jews, who controlled the country’s economy and media. Bin Laden was killed in 2011 by US military and intelligence services.

In a statement posted on XTikTok responded to Ms. Haley by saying that the distribution of Bin Laden’s letter violated the platform’s rules prohibiting support for terrorism, and that the platform was monitoring related content accordingly.

“We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it ended up on our platform,” the company said. “The number of videos on TikTok is small and reports that they are popular on our platform are inaccurate.”

A company spokesperson told The New York Times on Thursday that most of the views of the videos came after news organizations wrote about it, and that the letter had also “appeared on multiple platforms and in the media.”

Ms. Haley’s crusade against TikTok has become a flashpoint in the Republican presidential race, coinciding with her rise in the polls. Mr. Trump, her former boss, remains the overwhelming frontrunner, but Ms. Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, is trying to overtake Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for second place.

During last week’s Republican debate in Miami, she clashed with Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur, over calls for a TikTok ban. He said her daughter had a tab on the platform, which angered Ms Haley and led her to call Mr Ramaswamy “scum”.

Ms Haley has taken Mr Ramaswamy to task for joining TikTok, after previously referring to the app as “digital fentanyl.” In the days since the debate, she has argued that social media platforms need to better monitor certain users and content. prompting criticism from some of its rivals. Her call Tuesday for social media companies to verify users’ identities and ban people from posting anonymously was panned by Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Ramaswamy and others as unconstitutional and a threat to free speech.

“Do you know who anonymous writers were back then?” Mr. DeSantis wrote on X. “Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison when they wrote the Federalist Papers.”

Mrs. Haley told it CNBC a day later that her comments were directed at foreign adversaries, not Americans.

At a town hall for her campaign in Iowa on Thursday, Ms. Haley continued to press TikTok and brought up the bin Laden letter.

“And you have young Americans now saying, ‘Oh, he was right to do that,’” she said at a veterans post in Waverly. “Those are not the Americans who put that on TikTok. Those are our enemies putting that on TikTok because that’s what they want. They want to sow division and cause chaos in our country.”

Ms. Haley has attacked what she calls “foreign infiltration” of American society by hostile governments. She has focused mainly on propaganda and disinformation, which she says is being spread to young Americans by China, Russia and Iran through TikTok and other social media platforms.

She has also fueled the rise of Chinese investment in communities across the country, particularly in farmland acquisition and agricultural technology – an acute concern in rural states like Iowa.

Linda Schroeder of Dubuque said Ms. Haley’s focus on the issue put the candidate over the top as her choice.

“Why do we allow this? That they are here,” Ms. Schroeder said after hearing from Ms. Haley. “I grew up with fourteen other brothers and sisters on a farm, and we still have the farm, and we will keep it.”