A new survey suggests TikTok is a meaningful driver of a surge in antisemitism. #TikToxic
Spending at least 30 minutes a day on TikTok increases the chances a respondent holds antisemitic or anti-Israel views by 17% (compared with 6% for Instagram and 2% for X).
TikTok users are more likely to believe Jewish people are dishonest in business, are disloyal to America, and have too much power in the media. They are also more likely to disagree that Israel has a right to defend itself against those who want to destroy it.
This is not surprising when you consider that for every view of a TikTok video with a pro-Israel hashtag in the US, there are 54 views of videos with pro-Palestinian hashtags.
In fact, FreePalestine is currently one of the top-performing hashtags across all of TikTok.
This ratio differs from opinion polls, which show sentiment among Americans aged 18-24 split roughly equally between Israel and the Palestinians. TikTok does not merely reflect pre-existing sentiment—it is shaping views, creating a dangerous environment for Jews.
All of this matters, TikTok has tremendous reach. This chart benchmarks views of pro-Palestinian videos in the US against visits to the 10 mainstream news sites.
It's no wonder there's been a 10x increase in antisemitic incidents on college campuses compared with a year ago.
In the past, TikTok has taken action on WhiteLivesMatter, AllLivesMatter, LetterToAmerica. There are a series of hashtags (starting with FreePalestine) that, like WhiteLivesMatter, sound innocuous but are endangering young Jews. Those hashtags should go.
Like many others, I was shocked to see the results of the Harvard poll showing that 51% of 18-24 year-olds believe Hamas’s massacre of Israelis was justified.
Motivated by this post (), I sourced data on TikTok and Instagram Reels related to the war. 🧵1/7
My data covers videos that received 9B plays. By comparison, the NYTimes receives 425M visits per month. My data shows that Gaza-based photographer Motaz Azaiza () alone has posted videos that have been viewed 465MM times. 2/7 instagram.com/motaz_azaiza/r…
On Instagram, anti-Israel posts seem to spread more easily.
The largest pro-Israel account is gal_gadot, with 109.5M followers. Her 16 posts that support Israel have an average of 3.5M views per post.
motaz_azaiza has 11.4M followers but receives 15M plays per post
Been spending the last few weeks speaking to data scientists working on demand forecasting. Some interesting things I learned. 🧵
Forecasting sales for new products was mentioned by many as a big challenge. It's common to use historical sales for adjacent products to inform these forecasts. A few mentioned putting up a "coming soon" page for the new product to create training data for forecasts.
Heard ~across the board that internal data (eg historical sales, inventory levels and promotion data) is far more valuable than external data. To the extent that external data is useful at all, there can be some value in weather data and events data.