In a remark that puzzled many viewers, former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley throughout Wednesday’s Republican presidential candidate debate drew a linkage between TikTok utilization and antisemitism.
“We actually have to ban TikTok as soon as and for all,” she mentioned. “For each half-hour that somebody watched TikTok, on daily basis, they change into 17% extra antisemitic, extra pro-Hamas,” she mentioned.
Visually, a TikTok consumer’s antisemitism — if what Haley described was correct — would develop like so, doubling in simply 6.5 hours. (The ability of compound curiosity at work!)
Many have been fast to notice that Haley’s daughter has a broadly adopted TikTok account. However the extra pertinent background is that Haley isn’t precisely stating what a examine discovered, although she wasn’t far off.
The examine, a reasonably first rate pattern of some 1,323 People underneath the age of 30, discovered that spending half-hour a day on TikTok was related to a 17% enhance within the chance they have been to carry antisemitic or anti-Israel views in comparison with individuals who don’t use it in any respect. Whereas a lot increased than the antisemitic views of Instagram or X customers, the examine doesn’t recommend that persevering with to make use of the Chinese language-owned social media service will additional bolster the consumer’s antisemitic views.
And naturally there’s the essential distinction between causation and correlation, although the examine authors do be aware that for each video view with a pro-Israel hashtag, there are 54 with a pro-Palestinian one.
The dialogue comes after a Capitol Hill listening to drew consideration to the problem of campus antisemitism, and led to sharp criticism of the presidents of Harvard College, the College of Pennsylvania and MIT, for his or her unwillingness to wish to self-discipline college students who name for the genocide of Jews.
Now see: Harvard president on Hamas assault: ‘I used to be targeted on motion that weekend, not statements’
