TikTok is banning content that is promoting Osama bin Laden’s 2002 letter and its details amid the Israel-Hamas war.
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The letter became the subject of multiple viral videos as some users said they agreed with Bin Laden’s viewpoints about the United States. The letter was published almost a year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and listed the justifications for it, the United States’ support of Israel, and several antisemitic comments.”Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism,” the company said in a statement.
According to Reuters, a search for “A Letter to America” on TikTok did not appear as it considered content that violates the social media platform’s community guidelines.
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Lawmakers also addressed the controversy surrounding Tiktokers making content about the letter and White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said there shouldn’t be a justification for antisemitism.
“There is never a justification for spreading the repugnant, evil, and antisemitic lies that the leader of al Qaeda issued just after committing the worst terrorist attack in American history.”
The letter was originally published by The Guardian in 2002 but the news outlet said that the letter being shared on social media is being used out of context and they will redirect readers to the actual article that discusses it.
Osama bin Laden was a Saudi Arabian-born Islamist militant who founded the al-Qaeda terrorist organization. He is best known for masterminding the September 11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States. Bin Laden was born into a wealthy family in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 1957. He studied civil engineering at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah and became involved in the mujahideen movement, which fought against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
In 2001, al-Qaeda hijacked four airplanes and carried out suicide attacks against the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon just outside Washington, D.C., and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and led to the United States’ invasion of Afghanistan.
Bin Laden spent the next decade in hiding, evading capture by American and Pakistani forces. He was finally killed in a raid by US Navy SEALs in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011.
