TikTok is Fueling a Zombie Generation of Israel Haters

Amir Mizroch: 0:25

We're recording this on the 6th of December, my birthday day, 61 of what?

Anthony Goldbloom: 0:31

It'll be your birthday.

Amir Mizroch: 0:32

Thank you, I just threw that in there Day 61 of what started as a Hamas-Israel war in Gaza but is now kind of includes Hamas, islamic jihad and Hezbollah and Iranian militias in Syria and Houthis in Yemen and now Harvard, mit and Penn. And you know where else this war is happening? It's on social media and specifically on TikTok. There was maybe 20 days into the war, like October 26th, I came across a tweet an ex an ex tweet from a tech executive called Jeff Morris Jr, and it was like something along the lines of the TikTok war why do high school students in San Francisco hate Israel so much? That got my attention.

Amir Mizroch: 1:18

I use TikTok on and off and the last time I used it before the war, it was showing me stuff that I like Rugby, bikini, yoga, comedy, more rugby, easygoing, lighthearted stuff. And this tweet was like why do high school students in San Francisco hate Israel so much? I couldn't get my head around it. One conversation lead to another and I got to you, anthony Goldblum. Thank you very much for getting on the Dejaganizer. Can you just give us a quick minute on yourself?

Anthony Goldbloom: 1:50

Yeah, sure, and thanks very much for having me. Anthony Goldblum, my background is as an econometrician slash, a data scientist, originally from Australia. I started my career at the Australian Treasury and then the Reserve Bank of Australia. I started a company called Kaggle, which is a large machine learning community. We sold to Google In 2017, I stayed at Google for a little over five years and then left to start a new company called Sumble, which is building a knowledge graph for the world's external data, and so we buy and crawl a lot of external data sets.

Amir Mizroch: 2:21

I'm not going to give you a hard time on the Dejaganizer. What did you call it?

Anthony Goldbloom: 2:24

Knowledge graph Knowledge graph yeah.

Amir Mizroch: 2:28

They can do that in another episode. Sure, totally, but I think it's relevant to. I guess, what you were doing over the past month is you were a data analyst and you were doing data analysis on TikTok, right?

Anthony Goldbloom: 2:43

Yeah, exactly Because my company Sumble buys and crawls a lot of external data for our business. When I saw Jeff Morris' Juniors tweet, I found it very intriguing and I felt like I had both the skills being a data scientist by training as well as the knowledge of where to get external data sets from. That would allow me to actually answer that question. And the first question I was interested in answering after seeing that tweet is what is the ratio of pro-Palestinian content on? Actually not just TikTok? I was interested in across social media, so I looked closely at Instagram as well. But what is the ratio of pro-Palestinian versus pro-Israel content? And I sort of went into this thinking wow, it would be irresponsible if these social media platforms had a ratio of five or 10 to one and actually turns out the ratio on TikTok is quite a lot higher than that.

Amir Mizroch: 3:32

And how do you see that? Is that through hashtags?

Anthony Goldbloom: 3:35

Yeah, exactly so normally what people do is they will post a video and very frequently they will attach a description and as part of that description, they will attach hashtags as well, and very often the hashtag is quite expressive. It will tell you a lot about what is in the video. The number one hashtag with respect to the Israel Hamas conflict is free Palestine hashtag free Palestine. And when you look at those videos, the vast, vast majority of those videos tend to follow certain patterns. They tend to be images from Gaza. They'll be dead, holding a teddy bear, crying next to a building that has been bombed, or they belong to his son or granddaughter or whatever it is.

Anthony Goldbloom: 4:17

And I think that's the insinuation Very often there won't be words or anything. There'll be sort of melancholy music playing in the background, and that's a very common video to see.

Amir Mizroch: 4:27

So if we look at free Palestine versus. What is the versus hashtag? Is it destroy Hamas? Is it Israel will win? Like what is the opposing?

Anthony Goldbloom: 4:39

Yeah, the number one pro-Israel hashtag is stand with Israel. Then there are some others, like Hamas's ISIS, bring them home, which refers to bringing home the hostages and so forth, but the main pro-Israel hashtag is stand with Israel.

Amir Mizroch: 4:52

And what was the score on that that you found?

Anthony Goldbloom: 4:54

The ratio fluctuates on a daily basis. That's the December 3rd or 4th reading, which is the last one I took a look at. The ratio of free Palestine to stand with Israel was 30 to 1. But then there are other hashtags. If I remember this correctly, five of the top six hashtags are all pro-Palestinian.

Amir Mizroch: 5:12

Five of the top six.

Anthony Goldbloom: 5:14

Yeah, the way content spreads on TikTok is they will send out a video to 100 people and if that video gets above average engagement, then they'll send it out to another thousand people, and if it continues to get above average engagement, then they'll send it to 10,000 people, and so on and so forth. And so really what happens is contents can go viral if it grabs people's attention, which tends to promote the most sensational content. So you compare that with a platform like X, which also, you know, a lot of sensational content are circulating on X. However, there is a big difference. On X or and this is also true of Instagram, by the way in order to get distribution, you have to have built up a. In most cases, you have to have built up a following over you know, many, many, many months and years. Right, you have to consistently post content that interests people and then you build up a large following and then that large following buys you the ability to get large distribution. Tiktok is quite different. You could have posted your first post on TikTok might have had 20 views, the second post on TikTok might have had 50 views, your third post on TikTok might have had 10 views and then your fourth post can very easily have 40 million views, and so TikTok really tends to, you know, the most engaging in some cases.

Anthony Goldbloom: 6:34

You know, particularly around a conflict like Israel, gaza, the most sensational content tends to get the most engagement, which therefore drives the most circulation. And I think the TikTok model is really brilliant for fun dancing videos and yoga videos, like you mentioned, and, you know, cool rugby videos and so forth. But in my view it's very, very, very scary in the context of a conflict like Israel Gaza. And so you've got free Palestine with a Palestinian flag and a heart, you've got free Gaza, and so on and so forth. And sometimes these hashtags are used together. So you can't just add these up because, like, free Palestine and free Gaza might be used on the same post, you can't just add the views to both. But we have a measure for how often, for instance, free Palestine and free Gaza co-occur and when you sort of take into account all of that, the ratio has generally been around about 54 to 1.

Amir Mizroch: 7:25

54 to 1. And so it's actually an improvement now that we're 30 to 1. Or is that 54 to 1 actually the? It's actually the.

Anthony Goldbloom: 7:33

No. So 54 to 1 is the ratio. When you look at all the top pro-Palestinian hashtags, it can still go.

Amir Mizroch: 7:40

So that's the actual score. It's like wow 54 to 1.

Anthony Goldbloom: 7:46

The other piece to this that is important to know is that 54 to 1 wouldn't matter if Free Palestine wasn't a particularly large hashtag.

Anthony Goldbloom: 7:54

It's one of the biggest hashtags across all of TikTok at the moment, Up there with Taylor Swift and 2024 election related content. And if you look at the topics across TikTok that are trending at the moment, Free Palestine is right up there and you hear anecdotally the parents, for instance, of Jewish kids who continually tick not interested or select not interested on pro-Palestinian content. It still comes back into their feeds. Doesn't come back that regularly, but it comes back because there's so much inertia behind the pro-Palestinian content. And actually here's a fun fact for you it turns out that Free Palestine is the number one hashtag in Israel as well, so it's not a hashtag that's likely to get a lot of engagement in Israel. I believe a lot of people in the country are selecting not interested. However, there's just so much momentum behind the hashtag that there really aren't many TikTok users who aren't seeing pro-Palestinian content fairly regularly. And then, on the flip side, I think it's very, very rare that users are seeing pro-Israel content.

Amir Mizroch: 8:57

Wow. So this stuff is just generating. It has momentum. It's one of the top things on TikTok and, by the way, people who even aren't on TikTok they get sent this stuff on their WhatsApps, right, so you actually get to see this even if you're not on TikTok.

Anthony Goldbloom: 9:12

Yeah, that's true.

Amir Mizroch: 9:13

That Free Palestine and Free Gaza is. Is that just because there are more people in the world who, and young people in the world who, believe this and think this way, or is there something else going on here?

Anthony Goldbloom: 9:26

Social media companies will often say they're just a mirror that reflects back what society believes. But if you look at polling in the United States, there's a Pew poll, for instance, quite a large one that was conducted last year, and it's 60% of 18 to 29-year-olds have an unfavorable view of Israel. Right, so you can assume that 60% of American young Americans are sympathetic to the Palestinian side of this conflict. Now, if social media was just a mirror, you would then expect kind of TikTok's ratio of pro-Palestinian to pro-Israel content to be roughly 60-40, right? You certainly. You know, embedded in the 54 to 1 spread is more like a 98% support for the Palestinian side of this conflict. So there's something, you know, a little bit strange happening and this is something I got to tell you. I haven't come to a conclusive answer on and have actually spoken to the company about cats and high-level conversations with the TikTok leadership team just to point out that this is happening. There's a rise in a 10x increase in anti-submitted incidents on college campuses. You know, as Jeff Morris Jr pointed out, it's sort of hard to understand where that comes from. We shared this with the company and we said to them you know why is it 54 to 1? If you are just reflecting back what people believe, you know, shouldn't it be more like a 60-40 ratio?

Anthony Goldbloom: 10:44

There were a few kind of hypotheses that we ran over and never really got a conclusive answer on them. In the United States, there are 7 million Jews and 3.5 million Muslims. Maybe one might assume that Jews are more sympathetic to the Israel side of this conflict and Muslims are more sympathetic to the Palestinian side. However, in the world as a whole, there are 1.8 billion Muslims and 16 million Jews, and so one hypothesis we had is that there's a lot of cross-country flow. The free Palestine content is getting created in countries with large Muslim populations and being imported into the United States.

Anthony Goldbloom: 11:17

Tiktok has an advertiser analytics platform, which is where I've been getting a lot of the data that I've been looking at. So when you look at this data, you can see that more than 50% of the posts on the free Palestine hashtag, for instance, I come from countries like Indonesia, malaysia, pakistan, egypt, saudi Arabia, and so one question we put to the TikTok team is you know, are you effectively importing a Pakistani worldview onto US college campuses? Because if that's so, you know that's a very irresponsible thing to be doing. Pakistan and the United States have very different worldviews and the idea that TikTok might be importing a you know, quite a different worldview into the United States feels kind of scary. They said that there is not a lot of cross-country circulation, that you know that content from countries like Indonesia and Malaysia doesn't make it into the United States. I don't start from a position of trusting the company when they say there isn't a lot of cross-country flow and we do see some evidence that there is meaningful cross-country flow.

Amir Mizroch: 12:18

I don't even know who TikTok's leaders are. Obviously, you know there's a China connection, but what do they like? Like, were they, you know, engaging? Did they know about this? Were they interested with what I say to you?

Anthony Goldbloom: 12:31

Yeah, I mean I've had quite a few meetings with our TikTok leadership. I've met their CEO, their CEO, their head of trusted safety, their head of public policy and you know, as people they're all all all nice people. This is a challenging situation for them. Free Palestine has become a very trendy hashtag among a constituency that is very active on TikTok and I think for them to take action on this hashtag that would be a controversial thing. On the flip side, you know they express sympathy around anti-Semitism and what's happening on young people on college campuses in the United States. They did never affirmatively agree that there might be a direct connection between the content shown on their platform and you know what we see on your college campuses.

Amir Mizroch: 13:11

For me, the question is okay, it's the so what question? So this stuff is all virtual, it all happens on your phones and you get outraged, but this stuff doesn't actually ever go into the real world, but it kind of looks like it is Going into the real world and people are creating more TikTok content in these demonstrations they're doing in the campuses and on the streets or you know whatever they're doing. Right, that's also becoming TikTok content.

Anthony Goldbloom: 13:39

Yeah, we knew those are 54 to 1 spread and we know there's been a 10x increase in anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses. The thing that had been missing was this connection between the two. You know is what is happening on TikTok leading to real world. We actually conducted a survey of 1300 Americans aged 18 to 29. They were in 47 states around the United States and what we found in that survey was super interesting.

Anthony Goldbloom: 14:04

For people who spent 30 minutes or more on TikTok a day, they were 17% more likely to hold anti-Semitic or anti-Israel views than people who don't use TikTok at all. And then you compare that with Instagram, where people who spent 30 minutes or more a day on Instagram were 6% more likely to hold a day on Instagram. People who were more likely to hold anti-Semitic or anti-Israel views at only 2%. For X and the nature of the questions we asked people were things like do you think Jews are less likely to be honest in business than other Americans? Do you think Jews use the Holocaust to advance their political goals? Do you think Israel has a right to defend itself when attacked?

Amir Mizroch: 14:41

Do you believe that calling for the genocide of the Jews is harassment or hate speech?

Anthony Goldbloom: 14:48

And a big topic, the university president. I would have thought it was fairly clear. I found the responses to that question fairly surprising.

Amir Mizroch: 14:56

Anthony, the thing I guess that worries me on many levels, but also as an Israeli, is, when we talk about TikTok, we're talking about young people. When these young people in the next 10, 20 years, when they get into Congress, what does that mean? What does that mean for America? What does that mean for us, for Israelis? Who's the next Democratic president in 8 years, 12 years, going to be a person who got their views about this conflict on TikTok?

Anthony Goldbloom: 15:23

It's certainly something that I worry about as well. I started out with a broad focus on social media, not specifically focused on TikTok. I looked at particularly Instagram data as well and zeroed in on TikTok because for a couple of reasons. One is that the concentration of pro-Palestinian content is quite a lot higher on TikTok than it is on other social media platforms. And then the second part of this is that what you allude to, tiktok, is particularly popular among the younger demographic. That's a demographic where views are a little bit less fixed and are in the process of being shaped. A lot of people quibble about headlines in the BBC or the New York Times. I think it is all immaterial compared to what is circulating on TikTok. I find it scary for the same reason that you find it scary.

Amir Mizroch: 16:07

That's where their ideas are formed. Is it algorithmically weaponized, is it enhanced or is it just okay? There's more people doing this, so we're just going to show them more of that. How much do you know about their algorithm?

Anthony Goldbloom: 16:24

It's hard to know from the outside. There are certainly people in the United States who think it's crazy that we're heading into an election in 2024. Tiktok is owned by a Chinese company. There was all this concern in previous elections around Russian misinformation. Now you have one of the most dominant places where news gets distributed being owned by China, and there are a heck of a lot of people who find that very scary and believe that TikTok should be banned. There are also people who believe that the ratio of 54 to 1 isn't intentional move by China to so division both among Americans themselves as well as between America and how did you? Make that connection.

Anthony Goldbloom: 17:10

To be very clear, I'm not making that connection. I've seen data that suggests that things that China doesn't want to circulate doesn't circulate, and things China does want to circulate does circulate. That's the extent to which I can make a comment.

Amir Mizroch: 17:24

The China angle seems to be like a big elephant in the room, but I do actually just want to go around the elephant or even underneath its legs just for a moment and move back into the algorithm. I'm trying to understand if the algorithm elevates pro-Palestinian content and turns down pro-Israel, or how much of this is almost kind of organically generated because there's more of them than there are pro-Israel versus a platform algorithmic thing going on.

Anthony Goldbloom: 17:55

In my view, as I said, if social media is just a reflection of what people believe, there's a 60-40 pro-Palestinian, pro-israel polling figures in the United States, and you would expect that TikTok's distribution on the Israel-Hamas conflict would mirror that, and it doesn't. One hypothesis was what I shared earlier, that there's a lot of content flowing from overseas. Another thing we have seen is that since October 7, the ratio of free Palestine to stand with Israel has increased. It was closer to maybe 13 to 1 at the start of the conflict and, as I said, it's gone up to somewhere in the range of 54 to 1. Young people want to get their content to spread, and so people typically jump on the hashtags that are doing well right, and it creates a bit of a virtuous cycle, and so you see these videos.

Amir Mizroch: 18:39

I wouldn't call it a virtuous cycle. I would call it like an un-virtuous cycle A self-fulfilling cycle. It's like the blood libel that it used to take days, weeks, months for a blood libel to travel to another village, another town, and then the Jews will get pogromed. We're talking about a digital manifestation of this blood libel that has just gone viral around the world unbelievably fast.

Anthony Goldbloom: 19:09

Yeah, I agree. You see this phenomenon where people jump onto a hashtag that is gaining momentum, and so it might have been that there was somebody who used to give style tips on something people have seen, but a lot of. You had a creator that used to give a lot of style tips how to be fashionable and so forth on TikTok, and they've now converted to creating videos that show you how to wrap the kaphir, because that's doing well at the moment. And another example is you might have had a makeup artist. Obviously, now that makeup artist shows you how to paint the Palestinian flag on your cheek with makeup. So, as the hashtag does better, people switch their focus to jump onto content that is consistent with that amplifies a certain hashtag, which then helps to turn it into what free Palestine is today on TikTok, which is one of the largest hashtags across all of TikTok.

Amir Mizroch: 20:02

That is interesting and scary at the same time. I don't know if it was you or Jeff that said that TikTok is the number one search engine for more than half of Gen Z. I find this interesting also because we did an episode on Telegram and how to search Telegram and how to find stuff was not obvious to people. Do you know anything about how people find these hashtags? How do you get someone who was an influencer on Home Deco or yoga or fashion? How do they find this stuff? They weren't looking at the stuff at all.

Anthony Goldbloom: 20:37

I mean, the primary medium for TikTok is what's called the 4U page, but if what people love about it is it's so frictionless. You open up the app, it starts sending you videos. It notices the patterns of what you do and don't engage in and it sends you more of what you do engage with and sends you less of what you don't engage with. Now the consequence of FreePalest iron being so large on the platform is when you get onto let's say you're a new user, you get onto TikTok, it probably will not be too many videos that you need to wait for before you see a FreePalestine video. We haven't measured this, but let's say you might see a FreePalestine video in your first three to four videos and then, if you engage with that video, you dig it or you hate it.

Anthony Goldbloom: 21:19

Yeah, which in either direction, you'll either see more or you will see fewer of those videos. The 4U page really is the number one way that people engage with TikTok.

Amir Mizroch: 21:30

I know that the algorithm behind that is a little bit vague, but it sounds like there's a disproportionate representation, a complete imbalance. There's much more pro-Palestinian narrative than pro-Israeli perspective. It's not even close.

Anthony Goldbloom: 21:46

Yeah, not at all.

Amir Mizroch: 21:48

Okay.

Anthony Goldbloom: 21:49

One thing to finish off with is just the sense of scale. Just to give people a sense of just what the scale is of TikTok there are meaningfully more views on pro-Palestinian videos on TikTok than there are visits to all of the top 10 mainstream media sites in the United States, that's, the New York Times and CNN and so forth. The video views on TikTok just walk the engagement with mainstream media platforms. I just say that because I said earlier, some people quibble with some coverage from the New York Times or CNN or the BBC. But to the extent that you quibble with the coverage on those platforms and it bothers you, I think what's going on on TikTok might be a little bit less visible but, in my view, much more of a significant issue as far as, as you said earlier, shaping the views of the people who will be the elected officials and people in power in the next generation.

Amir Mizroch: 22:40

You've spoken to the company and also you on your ex Twitter account. You have forwarded people to a newsroom a TikTok newsroom statement on this and I can link to that. In the show I also see the hashtag from the river to the sea. Is that not a hashtag that TikTok should remove?

Anthony Goldbloom: 23:01

Yeah, I mean, it's been pointed out to them. My sense is that TikTok want to make the fewest, the smallest number of editorial changes that they can. Every time they make an editorial change, they claim to be a platform, not a site, that has editorial oversight of its content. That being said, they have taken down content in the past. They've taken down what lives matter. They've taken down all lives matter content. They've taken down content around things like there was the infamous summer bin Laden letter to America.

Anthony Goldbloom: 23:29

Relatively recently, there's been a lot of extreme dieting content on TikTok self harm contents. They get rid of all of it. Their mission statements is bring joy and inspire creativity and they have a community principle prevent harm and supposedly they are supposed to take down content that can be linked to harm. I think there is a fairly clear relationship between the 54 to one ratio of content that they're showing. People who spend more than 30 minutes a day on TikTok are 17% more likely to hold anti-Semitic views, and then that translates to a 10x increase in anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses. I think there is a fairly robust link between TikTok, and the company has chosen not to take action in this case.

Amir Mizroch: 24:15

I think that there are listeners who would be interested in this. In the telegram episode we did previously, I asked my guest how do you win on TikTok? How do you even know, specifically on Jews in Israel, the numbers? It's 2 billion against 16 million or 20 million. How does that work?

Anthony Goldbloom: 24:33

Look, I think it's very hard. I'm not sure I have good answers here. Free Palestine has become is now this viral social movement. I think TikTok had a role in making it a viral social movement, but that's what it is today. I'm not sure I have a good, clean, easy answer on how to fix this. I think the-.

Amir Mizroch: 24:51

Come on, it's a war. We need good clean, easy answers.

Anthony Goldbloom: 24:54

In my view, this ought to be pushed back onto the company. There is harm being created here. There's a 10x increase in anti-Semitic attacks. In my view, tiktok is wholly inequipped to be a major news source and should not be distributing news that is leading to real world harm and, frankly, shouldn't be distributing news full-stop. Imagine the New York Times or CNN showed a 54 to 1 slant on their coverage. There would be absolute outrage. Tiktok is larger and distributing news to more people than CNN and the New York Times. They're getting away with spreading news that has an unbelievably strong bias to it.

Amir Mizroch: 25:32

Then I guess it takes us back to our opening question and we can close out with this. Having taken us on a journey of TikTok as this young people's search engine news provider, a way of life, communities, let's ask that question again why do high school students in San Francisco hate Israel so much? Some of it seems to have a lot to do with TikTok.

Anthony Goldbloom: 25:55

At least that's my hypothesis. You see 54 to 1 ratio of very sad videos, video after video after video. It makes you sad, it makes you angry and then you look for an outlet.

Amir Mizroch: 26:06

I'm super grateful to be given an opportunity. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you for your openness and your patience with my interruptions and de-organization.

Anthony Goldbloom: 26:17

Thanks for having me.

Amir Mizroch: 26:32

Thanks for listening to The Dejargonizer. For more episodes and ways to connect with me, please visit Dejargonizerpod. com