Antisemitic Song Spreads on TikTok

This week the BBC discovered a video posted on TikTok that they describe as including ‘a sickening antisemitic song’ of significant concern because the way TikTok operates caused that video to get more than six million views.

It appeared on Sunday and included highly offensive lyrics about going to a place called Auschwitz. The video that used the song showed a giant robot scorpion with a swastika attacking and killing people.

Subsequently, nearly 100 users chose the song for their own videos and achieved a further half a million views. TikTok has now deleted the whole set of videos.

The organisation’s website says:

‘TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video.
Our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy.’

So, items like these videos clearly fall outside of the organisation’s mission.

But this week’s problem is not an isolated one. The social-media platform has previously been accused of being ‘a growing hotbed of extreme anti-Semitism.’

Research in Israel uncovered 196 postings related to far-right extremism, 43 of which were antisemitic.

The unsavoury conclusion is that some people get pleasure out of writing and posting this type of video. And TikTok is unique as a social media platform, in as much as its users “are almost all young children, who are more naïve and gullible when it comes to malicious content.”

A second difficulty is that TikTok is the youngest social media platform, so its staff lack experience of how to protect its users from disturbing and harmful content.

The researchers were able to identify TikTok accounts of known extremist groups and collect posts featuring hashtags linked to extremist movements.

This all raises the question as to how many parents are aware of the dangers that social media platforms hold for their children?