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Jewish Celebrities, Influencers Tell TikTok Executives in Private Video Call ‘Shame On You’
TikTok app is seen on a smartphone in this illustration taken, July 13, 2021. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
More than a dozen Jewish TikTok influencers and celebrities addressed the uptick in antisemitic harassment on the short-form video app during a private video call with TikTok executives on Wednesday night, according to a new report.
The New York Times obtained a recording of the meeting, which had more than 30 people in attendance — including actors Sacha Baron Cohen, Debra Messing, and Amy Schumer. The call was led by Adam Presser, TikTok’s head of operations, and Seth Melnick, the social media platform’s global head of user operations — both of whom are Jewish.
“Shame on you,” Cohen told Presser during the call. “What is happening at TikTok is it is creating the biggest antisemitic movement since the Nazis. If you think back to Oct. 7, the reason why Hamas were able to behead young people and rape women was they were fed images from when they were small kids that led them to hate.” He shamed TikTok for allowing similar inflammatory content, as well as misinformation, to spread on the platform.
“Obviously a lot of what Sacha says, there’s truth to that,” Presser replied, referring to Cohen’s comments about social media companies needing to take more action against antisemitism.
TikTok hosted the meeting on Wednesday in response to an open letter that more than 40 Jewish social media influencers and celebrities recently sent the app. They wrote in the letter that the platform is not safe for Jewish users, and that executives are “not doing enough” to curtail antisemitism and online hatred on TikTok.
Several members of Congress have also called for TikTok to be banned in the US, saying that the app, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, could allow the Chinese government to obtain data from Americans and influence the content promoted by TikTok’s algorithm. Lawmakers also argued that the platform is advancing anti-Israel content online amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.
TikTok announced on Thursday that it will prohibit content promoting the “Letter to America” written by the late al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2002 that started going viral on TikTok this week. The letter — in which Bin Laden justified the killing of Americans and expressed hatred of Jewish people and Israel — has garnered support among some social media users and was one of the issues raised during Wednesday’s video call.
The influencers and celebrities urged TikTok to take more steps against antisemitism on the platform and described the failure by TikTok’s tools to prevent antisemitic comments — such as “Hitler was right” or “I hope you end up like [Holocaust victim] Anne Frank — on posts uploaded by Jewish users.
Messing urged TikTok to moderate the usage of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a pro-Palestinian slogan that is widely interpreted as a call to eradicate Israel and replace it with “Palestine.” But Presser said if the phrase is used “casually,” TikTok’s 40,000 moderators will allow it.
“Where it is clear exactly what they mean — ‘kill the Jews, eradicate the state of Israel’ — that content is violative and we take it down,” he said on the call, according to The New York Times. “Our approach up until [Hamas’ massacre of Israelis on] Oct. 7, continuing to today, has been that for instances where people use the phrase where it’s not clear, where someone is just using it casually, then that has been considered acceptable speech.”
Messing fired back, saying, “It is much more responsible to bar it at this juncture than to say, ‘Oh, well, some people, they use it in a different way than it actually was created to mean.’ I understand that you are in a very, very difficult and complicated place, but you also are the main platform for the dissemination of Jew hate.”
TikTok said in a statement that it does not allow content with the slogan “when it’s used in a way that threatens violence and spreads hate.”
Other issues raised during the call included concerns about TikTok’s editing tools being used to create content targeting Jewish users and complaints about Jewish users not being able to directly contact a TikTok team member for help with harassment, or having to wait several days for a response.
“To hear that this place, this platform, this community that has brought you so much joy and helps each of you as individuals is becoming a place that feels like somewhere that you’re not sure you want to spend time on, I mean, that’s devastating,” Presser said. “This is where we get the feedback, this is where we hear what isn’t working. A lot of it, honestly I am embarrassed to say, is new. I haven’t heard a lot of it.”
The post Jewish Celebrities, Influencers Tell TikTok Executives in Private Video Call ‘Shame On You’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Iran Says Eight Arrested for Suspected Links to Israel’s Mossad Spy Agency
The Mossad recruitment ad. Photo: Screenshot.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on Saturday they had arrested eight people suspected of trying to transmit the coordinates of sensitive sites and details about senior military figures to Israel’s Mossad, Iranian state media reported.
They are accused of having provided the information to the Mossad spy agency during Israel’s air war on Iran in June, when it attacked Iranian nuclear facilities and killed top military commanders as well as civilians in the worst blow to the Islamic Republic since the 1980s war with Iraq.
Iran retaliated with barrages of missiles on Israeli military sites, infrastructure and cities. The United States entered the war on June 22 with strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
A Guards statement alleged that the suspects had received specialized training from Mossad via online platforms. It said they were apprehended in northeastern Iran before carrying out their plans, and that materials for making launchers, bombs, explosives and booby traps had been seized.
State media reported earlier this month that Iranian police had arrested as many as 21,000 “suspects” during the 12-day war with Israel, though they did not say what these people had been suspected of doing.
Security forces conducted a campaign of widespread arrests and also stepped up their street presence during the brief war that ended in a US-brokered ceasefire.
Iran has executed at least eight people in recent months, including nuclear scientist Rouzbeh Vadi, hanged on August 9 for passing information to Israel about another scientist killed in Israeli airstrikes.
Human rights groups say Iran uses espionage charges and fast-tracked executions as tools for broader political repression.
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Body of Idan Shtivi, Murdered on Oct. 7, Retrieved from Gaza in Special IDF Operation
Idan Shtivi. Photo: Courtesy of the family
i24 News – The body of Idan Shtivi, a 28-year-old murdered by Palestinian jihadists at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023, was recovered in a joint operation by the IDF and Shin Bet in central Gaza, it was cleared for publication on Saturday.
Shtivi’s remains were returned to Israel alongside the body of Ilan Weiss, another hostage killed during the October 7 massacre.
“Idan Shtivi was abducted from the Tel Gama area and brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists after acting to rescue and evacuate others from the Nova music festival on October 7th, 2023. He was 28 years old at the time of his death,” read an IDF press release.
“Following an identification process conducted at the National Center for Forensic Medicine, along with the Israel Police and the Military Rabbinate, the Hostages and Missing Persons Headquarters notified his family.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Shviti “was a gifted student of sustainability and governance, and a courageous individual” who acted heroically on October 7, helping others flee.
“He was killed in the process and his body was abducted to Gaza by Hamas. My wife and I send our heartfelt condolences to the Shtivi family. So far, 207 hostages have been returned, 148 of them alive. We will continue to act tirelessly and decisively to bring back all our hostages—living and deceased.”
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Woman Stabbed at Ottawa Grocery Store in Latest Antisemitic Attack
A social media post by the alleged attacker, Joseph Rooke of Cornwall, Ontario. Photo: Screenshot via i24
i24 News – The stabbing of a Jewish woman at an Ottawa grocery by a man with a long history of antisemitic posts on social media, the latest antisemitic hate crime in Canada, sparked outrage and prompted condemnation from officials including the prime minister.
Both the victim and the attacker are in their 70s. The woman is reportedly in serious condition.
The suspect was identified as Joseph Rooke, who has authored a series of lengthy rambling screeds on social media, ranting against Israel and Jews.
“Judaism is the world’s oldest cult,” he writes in one post, going on to say “over time jews have become insidious in governments, businesses, media conglomerates, and educational institutions in order to do what they do better than anyone else. Jews are the world’s masters of propaganda, gaslighting, demonization, demagoguery, and outright lying. Using their collective wealth they have become masters of reprisal.”
“I am under no obligation whatsoever, legal, moral, or otherwise, to like jews and I do not. If that means I meet the jewish definition of an anti-semite, so be it.”
Canada has seen a steep spike in antisemitic attacks over the past two years, including a recent incident in Montreal where a Hasidic Jew was beaten in front on his children.
After Prime Minister Mark Carney condemned the incident, many, including former Israel’s ambassador the US Michael Oren, pointed out that Carney’s rhetoric and policies contribute to the increasing insecurity of Canada’s Jewish community through uncritical embrace of outrageous and easily disprovable allegations that Israel and its supporters were guilty of the worst crimes against humanity.