After videos about Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America” went viral on the platform and were re-uploaded to the social media platform X, TikTok removed the hashtag #lettertoamerica from its search function. The Al Qaeda founder’s document, according to some social media users, offers an alternative viewpoint on American involvement in Middle Eastern conflicts.
TikTok users had been posting links to The Guardian’s transcript of bin Laden’s letter all week. The letter was written approximately a year after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 Americans. On Wednesday, The Guardian removed the letter from its online platform.
Bin Laden wrote a letter to the American people in which he attempted to respond to the following queries: “Why are we fighting and opposing you?” and “What do we want from you, and what are we calling you to?” The letter uses homophobic rhetoric and antisemitic language.
The letter’s virality has rekindled criticism of the Byte Dance-owned platform in China. The app has come under increasing scrutiny over the past year because of claims made by the US and other nations that it endangers national security. Since the attack on Israel by Hamas on October 7, detractors of the app have claimed that it is abusing its power to promote content that is hostile to Israel and at odds with American foreign policy objectives. According to TikTok, the accusations of bias are unfounded.
Studying extremism on social media, researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue claimed to have discovered 41 “Letter to America” videos on TikTok. The institute noted in its findings that although TikTok has since removed “Letter to America” from its search engine, videos referencing the text can still be found by searching for “Bin Laden.”
In his letter, Bin Laden denounces American backing for Israel and charges the country with complicity in the oppression of the Palestinian people. In addition, Bin Laden criticized US interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Kashmir, Chechnya, and Lebanon before being assassinated in a 2011 US special operation in Pakistan.
Online users have jumped on bin Laden’s remarks to start conversations about US foreign policy in the Middle East. Many have stated that it led them to reconsider their opinions regarding the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Although many expressed disapproval of the United States’ engagement in international conflicts, they made it clear that they were neither endorsing nor justifying bin Laden’s planning of the 9/11 attacks.
People who posted links to the letter on the platform urged readers to read it in order to gain a deeper understanding of American interventions in the Middle East and the Israel-Hamas conflict. The videos have also gone viral on X, where some people are once again calling for the banning of TikTok.
The letter has been re-uploaded on TikTok, but many of the videos that discussed it have been taken down. Videos containing the letter are against TikTok’s community guidelines, according to a spokesperson for the platform, Ben Rathe, in an email.
Content endorsing this letter, according to Rathe, “clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism.” “We are actively and swiftly eliminating this content from our platform and looking into how it got there. There are very few videos on TikTok, and it is false to say that they are trending on our platform. This has been seen on other platforms and in the media, and it is not exclusive to TikTok.
Journalist Yashar Ali’s popular X post showcasing the videos garnered 25.6 million views. That increased awareness of the TikTok controversy. According to TikTok, there weren’t many videos about the letter at first, but interest in them increased after they were uploaded to X.
Although Ali claimed that the quantity of videos uploaded on TikTok was “not small enough to be minuscule or not important,” he told The Washington Post that the hashtag was not trending when he created his compilation.
According to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s research, from Tuesday to Thursday, the number of references to bin Laden on X increased by over 4,300%, from slightly over 5,000 to over 230,000. Across the platform, references to “Letter to America” increased by more than 1,800%, from slightly over 4,800 to 100,000, with 719 million impressions.
According to Google Trends, searches for bin Laden on YouTube increased 400% between Tuesday and Thursday. Instagram’s search autosuggest feature helped users discover “Letter to America,” indicating that it was a “popular search.”
Requests for comment on Thursday were met with no immediate response from representatives of X, YouTube, or Meta, the company that owns Instagram.
YouTube states that content “intended to praise, promote, or aid violent extremist or criminal organizations is not allowed” on the platform. This is in line with its policy regarding violent extremist or criminal organizations. Users are warned not to share “content produced by terrorist, criminal, or violent extremist organizations.”
The website “may also remove posts disseminating manifestos or other content produced by perpetrators,” according to X’s guidelines, and “will remove any accounts maintained by individual perpetrators of terrorist, violent extremist, or mass violent attacks.”
The social media site “is not a place to support or praise terrorism, organized crime, or hate groups,” according to Instagram’s community guidelines.
The Guardian’s website showed the removed document’s link as one of the most viewed as of Thursday afternoon.
An email statement from a representative for The Guardian stated, “The transcript that was published on our website in 2002 has been widely shared on social media without the full context.” As a result, we have chosen to remove it and send readers to the news story that first provided context for it.