Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman said TikTok should “probably be banned” for “massively manipulating public opinion” in favor of Hamas and stoking anti-Israel animus.
Ackman, the CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, blamed social media for “amplifying the hate” following reports that pro-Palestine videos on TikTok outnumbered pro-Israel videos by as much as 15 to 1.
“The world is quickly moving to a very dark place,” Ackman wrote on his X social media account on Monday. “Social media has been amplifying the hate for a decade as algorithms wind us up.”
Ackman — who also on Wednesday backtracked on calls to identify Harvard students who signed a letter blaming Israel “100%” for the terrorist attacks — nevertheless lamented the “generational differences on support for Hamas,” partly blaming TikTok.
He noted that “51% of the TikTok generation say that Hamas’ barbaric acts are justified” — apparently referring to a Harvard University poll of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 who believed Hamas was justified in carrying out the attacks which left at least 1,400 Israeli civilians and soldiers dead.
Meanwhile, a recent Reuters poll found 20% of people aged 18 to 24 go to TikTok for news, up 5% compared to last year. At the same time, public trust in traditional news outlets has dwindled.
Ackman echoed Republican lawmakers who earlier this week told The Post that TikTok’s perceived anti-Israel bias stemmed from its alleged close ties to the Chinese Communist Party. TikTok is owned by Beijing-based parent company ByteDance.
Ackman singled out TikTok, though he also slammed other social media platforms including Meta’s Facebook and Instagram as well as X, the Elon Musk-owned outfit formerly known as Twitter.
He said AI that drives the apps is “quickly beginning to destroy the ability to empirically identify the truth” and that they “need to fix the algorithms so that we are able to find common ground.”
“And yes, TikTok should probably be banned,” Ackman added. “A foreign government should not be in control of the minds of our next generation of leaders.
“If we don’t fix this soon, humanity is on a rapid path to oblivion, and it will be too late.”
The Post has sought comment from Ackman, Meta, and X.
A spokesperson for TikTok pushed back on Ackman’s claims, telling The Post: “There is no basis to these false claims.”
The TikTok rep told The Post that the app applies its guidelines “equally to all content on TikTok and we’re committed to consistently enforcing our policies to protect our community.”
“The content on TikTok is generated by our community, and recommended based on content-neutral signals from users, and is not influenced by any government,” the spokesperson said.
TikTok also said it “stands firmly against hateful ideologies, including antisemitism, which have no place on our platform.”
“We remove this content immediately when we identify it,” the TikTok spokesperson told The Post.
The Post reported this week that Republican lawmakers who are increasingly concerned about a tide of anti-Israel content on TikTok during the war with Hamas are renewing their push to ban the China-owned app.
TikTok is owned by parent company ByteDance, which has denied US government claims that it is spying on Americans for the Chinese government.
“A foreign government should not be in control of the minds of our next generation of leaders,” Ackman wrote of TikTok.
The app’s pro-Palestinian leanings were apparent when searches were done using terms such as “stand with Palestine,” which were viewed nearly 3 billion times while the top result for “stand with Israel” was seen over 200 million times.
TikTok’s own data obtained by Axios showed a similar gap in the US, with more than twice as many posts using the hashtag #StandwithPalestine as posts with #StandwithIsrael over the last two weeks.
The TikTok spokesperson pointed to a recent NBC News report which disputed the findings.
NBC News cited figures showing that TikTok hashtags such as #standwithpalestine and #standwithisrael were evenly tied in the US over the past month.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) told the Post that it “would not be surprising that the Chinese-owned TikTok is pushing pro-Hamas content” to serve China’s agenda – which has increasingly aligned with the interests of rival nations such as Russia and Iran.
The US government has threatened to crack down on TikTok over suspicions that the app was harvesting Americans’ user data and providing it to Chinese authorities.
TikTok has denied the allegations.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
