NEW YORK (LifeSiteNews) — Benjamin Netanyahu described the expected purchase of the social media platform TikTok by allies of Israel as the acquisition of a “weapon” that is “most important” to “fight the fight.” And he believes this development “could be extremely consequential.”
The Israeli prime minister was speaking to a group of “pro-Israel influencers” in a meeting after his address at the United Nations General Assembly last Friday were an overwhelming majority of national delegations walked out in apparent protest to what is widely considered a genocidal war he and his nation are inflicting against the Palestinian people in Gaza.
A media release from Netanyahu’s office reported the prime minister spoke with this group of “pro-Israel American influencers” about “challenges in the new era, as well as the public diplomacy efforts and the influence of the social networks on the discourse for and against Israel.”
Asked about how to combat dangers to the Zionist cause due to a potential loss of Evangelical support in the United States, which is also impacted by popular Israel-critics Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, Netanyahu directed his listeners to considering social media as “tools for battle” and then emphasized the expected purchase of TikTok to be “most important” in serving Israel’s interests in this regard.
“What we have to do is we have to secure that part of the base of our support in the United States, that is being challenged systematically… How do we fight back? Our influencers, I think you should also talk to them if you have a chance,” the prime minister said. “And secondly, we’re going to have to use the tools of battle. The weapons change over time… we have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields within which we’re engaged. And the most important ones are on social media.”
Netanyahu then celebrated “the most important purchase that is going on right now” that he identified as being TikTok. “And I hope it goes through because it can be consequential.”
‘TikTok problem’ about free speech regarding Israel
In November 2023, a recording was leaked of the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt sounding the alarm that Israel had “a major, major, major generational problem” with all of the polling indicating “the issue in the United States’ support for Israel is not left and right. It is young and old.”
“We really have a TikTok problem, a Gen Z problem, that our community needs to … put our energy toward … like fast,” the ADL national director exclaimed at the time.
Attitudes among Generation Z Americans, those who are 30 years old and younger, toward Israel have been low and dropping steadily in recent years. A 2022 Pew survey found that 55 percent of Americans had a favorable view of Israel but that only 41 percent of those ages 18-29 had a favorable view of Israel, compared with 69 percent of those age 65 or older.
By 2024, Pew found that those in Gen Z who sympathize with Israel had fallen to just 14 percent, with 33 percent expressing sympathies for the Palestinians.
A 2023 article published by The Hill similarly reported that Gen Z “is more skeptical of Israel than older Americans. On TikTok, where half the users are under 30, #freepalestine has 31 billion posts compared with 590 million for #standwithisrael – more than 50 times as many.”
Israel Lobby orgs back TikTok bill to prevent ‘anti-Israel sentiment’ from running ‘rampant’ on platform
Seeking a remedy for this supposed problem the ADL and other groups from the Israel Lobby, along with many other entities, lobbied for the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” (PAFACA). This bill’s stated aim was to forbid applications “such as TikTok” from operating in the United States due to its ties with the Chinese government and resulting concerns over this “foreign adversary” misusing data collected from the app’s American users.
However, as Israel’s genocidal war against the people of Gaza marched on, the Jewish Federations of North America lobbied for passage of the bill, accusing TikTok of allowing “anti-Israel sentiment to run rampant” while the Zionist women’s advocacy group Hadassah also joined the lobbying due to a concern over antisemitism on the platform.
Top politicians took up this cause as well. Texas GOP Senator Ted Cruz complained that TikTok promoted “anti-Israel propaganda,” while former presidential candidate Nikki Haley alleged that “for every 30 minutes that someone watches TikTok every day they become 17 percent more antisemitic.”
READ: How the ‘antisemitism industry’ became the biggest threat to freedom in the West
Legislators heavily funded by AIPAC, bill passed for purposes of censorship
Furthermore, according to the Nebraska Examiner, each of the bill’s 55 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives had received donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) within the previous two election cycles. The total amount awarded to these legislators for their respective 2024 campaigns alone was $3.35 million.
In April 2024, just five months after Greenblatt’s warning above, the U.S. Congress passed PAFACA with bipartisan support and Joe Biden signed it into law.
Marveling at how quickly the TikTok legislation was passed Senator Mitt Romney did not say this was caused by pressing concerns in Congress over Chinese data collection, but he rather admitted the next month it was due to the volume of pro-Palestinian postings happening on that platform as compared to those supporting Israel in its ongoing attacks upon Gaza.
READ: Mitt Romney admits TikTok ban was about censoring pro-Palestinian content
Pro-Israel billionaire Larry Ellison to now control TikTok’s algorithm
Last Thursday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order approving a deal to place TikTok under the control of predominantly American companies. One of the entities that will have a significant stake in TikTok with the authority to control its algorithm is Oracle, which is owned by extremely pro-Israel billionaire Larry Ellison.
Not only is Ellison the second richest man in the world, but he is the single largest private donor to an Israeli army that stands accused of enormous numbers of war crimes in Gaza. Indeed, Netanyahu himself, along with his former defense chief, Yoav Gallant, were indicted last year by the International Criminal Court “for crimes against humanity and war crimes,” including “starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”
In a piece titled “Israel wins TikTok,” Kelley Vlahos summarizes, “Larry Ellison and a constellation of billionaires will finally get their way, buying the very app they wanted to kill a year ago for being too ‘pro-Palestinian.’”
Another investor included is well-known media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who owns hundreds of local, national, and international publishing outlets around the world, including The Wall Street Journal, Fox News and the New York Post. He evidently has a tight attachment to Israel, including a close family relationship with Netanyahu, perhaps due in part to his mother reportedly being an Orthodox Jew.
‘Psychological warfare’ primarily concerned with suppressing ‘unauthorized communication among subject peoples’
In response to these developments, popular commentator Candace Owens tweeted, “I love that Bibi Netanyahu was asked how to combat Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson and his answer was effectively ‘we have to buy TikTok.’”
In apparent reference to Israel’s ongoing genocidal attacks upon Gaza, Owens observed, “Like it has never once occurred to these people to simply stop murdering people and maybe start telling the truth. Not even an option.”
An X/Twitter user named Heinz replied, “Notice how the solution is always more control of media platforms, never reform of their own behavior.”
In a 2016 documentary, Occupation of the American Mind, producers detail the history of Israel’s approach to propaganda and censorship as a means of maintaining reprehensible policies of aggressions against their targeted enemies in the region. When the atrocities become known, naturally evoking widespread outrage, “rather than acknowledge there’s anything wrong with the policy,” and considering changing it, “there’s a doubling down on the PR (public relations) effort,” one expert explained in the film.
Additionally, the entry on “the big lie” in the Jewish Virtual Library (JVL) also explains how it is essential for governments to exercise censorship, or rather, “shield the people” from accurate information exposing the consequences of their lies resulting from their seriously evil policies.
“It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State,” the JVL reads.
Furthermore, in his seminal 1994 work Science of Coercion, Christopher Simpson explains how “modern psychological warfare” is used as “a tool for managing empire” primarily by suppressing or distorting “unauthorized communication among subject peoples, including domestic U.S. dissenters who challenged the wisdom or morality of imperial policies.”
Netanyahu turns his sights beyond TikTok to ‘X’ as well
With an apparent intention of “shielding the people” from information the Israeli government is loath for them to see, along with the suppressing or distorting of communication among these “subject peoples” in the United States, Netanyahu seems to expect his allies to end TikTok’s democratization of the news, putting an end to its allowing “anti-Israel sentiment to run rampant” on the platform— even as this nation commits “the most grievous, heinous crime on the planet,” genocide.
Nor does this appear to be enough for him. Continuing in his discourse with “pro-Israel influencers,” the prime minister turned his sights further to focus on “X” / Twitter emphasizing the importance of engaging this social platform as well.
“And so, we have to talk to Elon, he’s not an enemy. He’s a friend,” Netanyahu said about the company’s owner, Elon Musk. “We should talk to him.”
“Now if we can get those two things (TikTok and X), we get a lot,” he concluded.
