US Politics
Hillary Clinton claims TikTok misinformation is influencing young people’s views on the Israel–Palestine conflict
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Hillary Clinton has claimed that young Americans are being persuaded to support the Palestinian cause by social media, lashing out at misinformation and saying some videos of violence in Gaza are “totally made up.”
The 2016 Democratic presidential candidate made the comments Tuesday at a summit in New York City hosted by the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom.
“Smart, well-educated, young people from our own country, from around the world, where were they getting their information?” Clinton asked at the event. “They were getting their information from social media, particularly TikTok.”
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She continued: “That is where they were learning about what happened on October 7, what happened in the days, weeks, and months to follow. That’s a serious problem. It’s a serious problem for democracy, whether it’s Israel or the United States, and it’s a serious problem for our young people.”
Barack Obama’s secretary of state complained that she had tried to “engage in some kind of reasonable discussion” over the conflict with young people, without elaborating on to whom she was referring, but had found it “very difficult because they did not know history, they had very little context, and what they were being told on social media was not just one-sided, it was pure propaganda.”
She continued: “It’s not just the usual suspects. It’s a lot of young Jewish Americans who don’t know the history and don’t understand. A lot of the challenge is with younger people. More than 50 percent of young people in America get their news from social media.
“So just pause on that for a second. They are seeing short-form videos, some of them totally made up, some of them not at all representing what they claim to be showing, and that’s where they get their information.”
Clinton did not offer any specific examples of videos from Gaza she believed were fake, manipulated, misleading or lacking in context.
The Independent has contacted her office for comment.
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Another former member of the Obama administration, ex-White House speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz, made similar remarks during a recent summit hosted by the Jewish Federations of North America, according to Mediaite.
“You have TikTok just smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza,” Hurwitz said.
“And this is why so many of us can’t have a sane conversation with younger Jews, because anything that we try to say to them, they’re hearing it through this wall of carnage.”
The statistic Clinton quoted about young Americans’ media consumption appears to come from the Reuters Institute’s June research, which found that 54 percent of U.S. citizens now get their news from Facebook, X, and YouTube, compared with TV (50 percent) and news sites and apps (48 percent).
According to the author of the research, Nic Newman, the development is a “challenge” because click-driven news is vulnerable to manipulation given that it enables bad actors to “bypass traditional journalism in favour of friendly partisan media, ‘personalities,’ and ‘influencers’ who often get special access but rarely ask difficult questions, with many implicated in spreading false narratives or worse.”
