Videos on TikTok supporting a decades-old letter by Osama bin Laden criticizing the United States and its support of Israel surged in popularity this week. The letter, titled “Letter to America,” was published a year after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that were orchestrated by Bin Laden. He defended the attacks in New York and Washington and said Americans had become “servants” to Jews, who he said controlled the country’s economy and media. American taxpayers, he wrote, were complicit in harming Muslims in the Middle East, including destroying Palestinian homes.
Some TikTok users said this week that they viewed the document as an awakening to America’s role in global affairs and expressed their disappointment in the United States. One popular video showed a TikTok user brushing her hair with the caption, “When you read Osama bin Laden’s letter to America and you realize you’ve been lied to your whole entire life.”
Early Thursday, a search for #lettertoamerica showed videos with 14.2 million views. By midday, as TikTok sought to block the content, searches on the site for “osama bin laden,” “bin laden letter” and “osama letter” and the hashtag #lettertoamerica yielded no results on the “videos” tab of TikTok, though some videos were still viewable with some digging.
Alex Haurek, a spokesman for TikTok, said that “content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism,” and that the company was “aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform.” He said the letter had also “appeared across multiple platforms and the media.”
The letter was also brought up in a private meeting between TikTok executives and Jewish TikTok creators and celebrities on Wednesday night. The company has been accused of amplifying pro-Palestinian and antisemitic content, and the rise of videos around the Bin Laden letter have resurfaced accusations that the app is working to push the interests of the Chinese government.
Some Republican lawmakers have renewed their calls to ban the app. Republican lawmakers like Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Josh Hawley of Missouri shared videos tied to the letter on social media this week. On X, Mr. Hawley called TikTok “a geyser of terrorist propaganda — and the most effective surveillance tool for a foreign government ever invented.”
