Politics

Social Media Giants Crack Down On Viral Osama Bin Laden Letter Justifying 9/11 Attacks

Osama bin Laden (L) sits with his adviser and purported successor Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian linked to the al Qaeda network, during an interview with Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir (not pictured) in an image supplied by the respected Dawn newspaper November 10, 2001. Al Qaedas elusive leader Osama bin Laden was killed in a mansion outside the Pakistani capital Islamabad, U.S. President Barack Obama said on May 1, 2011. REUTERS/Hamid Mir/Editor/Ausaf Newspaper for Daily Dawn (AFGHANISTAN - Tags: POLITICS CONFLICT IMAGES OF THE DAY). (Foto: HO/Scanpix 2011)

Social media platforms Instagram and TikTok decided to crack down on Osama bin Laden’s 2002 letter justifying the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon after it went viral Wednesday evening.

Users were reading the letter on Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-linked TikTok and giving positive reactions to it, posting #LetterToAmerica, journalist Christina Buttons reported on X — formerly Twitter. Instagram hid the hashtag #LetterToAmerica while TikTok asserted this content breaches its rules on supporting terrorism and took down the hashtag on Thursday.

“Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism,” a TikTok spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform. The number of videos on TikTok is small and reports of it trending on our platform are inaccurate. This is not unique to TikTok and has appeared across multiple platforms and the media.”

When searching for the letter now, results do no not show up on the platform, according to Reuters.

Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism. We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform. The number of videos on TikTok is small and reports of it trending on our… https://t.co/n9Zo7l94r2

— TikTok Policy (@TikTokPolicy) November 16, 2023

Videos urged people to read the letter or agreed with bin Laden’s perceptions of Israel and the U.S., gaining many thousands of views on social media, according to Semafor. TikTok and Instagram experience analogous content on their platforms, including users sharing posts from TikTok on Instagram.

TikTok has recently faced criticism due to anti-Israel content proliferating on the platform during the Israel-Hamas War, and because of its connections to the CCP. Beijing-based ByteDance owns the platform and has an internal CCP committee.

“Now trending on social media (especially TikTok) people saying that after reading Bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America,’ they now understand terrorism is a legitimate method of resistance against ‘oppression’ and America deserved to be attacked of 9/11,” Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida posted on X.

Media outlet The Guardian deleted the letter Wednesday after it had been up on the site since it was published on Nov. 24, 2002.

U.S. Navy SEALs killed bin Laden in a raid on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 1, 2011.

Instagram and Meta did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated.