Thread by @jmj

The TikTok War: Why High School & College Kids Are Getting The Wrong Information about Hamas & Israel

I spent the weekend trying to reverse engineer the TikTok algorithm, as I am convinced this is the reason we're losing the information war with high school & college students.

🚩One red flag was seeing San Francisco high school students who were aggressively anti-Israel and asking myself where they were getting news.

Their protests happened right after the fake @nytimes headline that accused Israel of the hospital bomb.

https://twitter.com/qurantheonlyway/status/1715437165964886282

🚩The bigger red flag was seeing 51% of Americans ages 18-24 believe Hamas (terrorists who raped & murdered innocent women & children) believe Hamas was justified. Wtf.

My high school classmates who lived through 9/11 would have never believed this.

https://twitter.com/shiraeis/status/1716860608614633529

Why do high school students in San Francisco hate Israel so much?

I'd assume very few of them have been to Israel, let alone have a fully formed view of a multi-generation conflict.

They're 16 years old and live in California. Let's be serious for a minute.

For Gen Z, TikTok Is the New Search Engine

TikTok is the #1 search engine for more than half of Gen Z.

TikTok is the primary news source for many younger demos & while we have justifiable concerns about The New York Times & mainstream media, this has become a TikTok war.

What I discovered through data and user testing is extremely concerning & I believe requires more attention, as this is an actual national security issue.

When I engaged with one post on TikTok supporting opposing views, my entire feed became aggressively anti-Israel. It was as if I was placed in an AB test variant and was told to see this war with Israel being the evil side.

As I looked at the tactics and data, I saw that much of TikTok is being controlled by anti-Israel bot farms, paid commenters/likers/sharers — much of which is paid for by Hamas supporting organizations.

I then looked at the data and saw that Israel is losing the TikTok war by a longshot.

As an example, the top hashtag is 3b views for Palestine versus 200m views for Israel.

If you look at other hashtags, it is clear that Israel has a distribution issue.

Because the TikTok narrative is now so anti-Israel, the engagement flywheel encourages creators to support that narrative because it’s getting the most attention and creating anti-Israel content helps them increase their following.

While we are spreading our perspectives on Twitter, we need to figure out a way to balance out the narrative on TikTok otherwise I worry we will fall too far behind with high school and college kids — and this is where they get their news.

I’m still researching — and if anybody with a data background wants to join, please let me know.

I have never been a "social media is bad" person, but high school/college students are literally our future & we're on the brink of a potential global war.

So maybe this matters.