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ADL Report Highlights White Supremacist Activity on TikTok

The report states that white supremacists are doing voiceovers of popular clips to spread their propaganda.
[additional-authors]
August 17, 2020
WASHINGTON, DC – AUGUST 07: In this photo illustration, the TikTok app is displayed on an Apple iPhone on August 7, 2020 in Washington, DC. On Thursday evening, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that bans any transactions between the parent company of TikTok, ByteDance, and U.S. citizens due to national security reasons. The president signed a separate executive order banning transactions with China-based tech company Tencent, which owns the app WeChat. Both orders are set to take effect in 45 days. (Photo Illustration by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

An Aug. 13 Anti-Defamation League (ADL) report chronicles how white supremacists have spread anti-Semitism on the social media app TikTok.

According to the report, there are more than 800 million users of TikTok. Carla Hill, a research fellow for the ADL’s Center on Extremism, told the Journal that the spread of hate on TikTok is “concerning because it’s a platform used by very young people.”

She said the primary method used to promulgate white supremacist propaganda is through voiceovers on existing videos. The report cited one example that includes a user saying over a video of Swedish YouTuber PewDiePie, “Hey, guys, PewDiePie here. Death to all Jews. I want you to say after me: Death to all Jews. And you know, Hitler was right. I’ve really opened my eyes to white power and I think it’s time we did something about it.” Another example involved a clip from “The Incredibles” movie portraying Mr. Incredible’s supervisor “as a hateful and manipulative Jew bent on enacting globalist policies.”

“This is also a way to avoid detection, I think,” Hill said. “The [TikTok] editors have to listen to every video to pick up on the fact that it is anti-Semitic. And that’s where I found a lot of anti-Semitism.”

Another way white supremacists avoid detection, according to the report, is through purposeful misspellings, known as “spoonerisms.”

“The strategy includes misspellings, transposition of the first letters of two words and the use of numbers in place of letters, such as 4 for the letter ‘A,’ 3 for the letter ‘E,’ and 1 for the letters ‘I’ and ‘L,’ ” the report stated. “Some examples of the tactics include ntupidsigger, kuuklixklan, 4d0lfH1t13r, N4z1 and negr0ki11er. One individual on the platform uses Morse code in their bio to say, ‘Kill the gays.’ ”

White supremacist TikTok users also direct people to sources of extremist content outside of the app at the end of seemingly normal music videos, Hill said. Examples include a series titled “Siege” and a book titled “The Turner Diaries,” both of which involve neo-Nazis calling for a race war. “They use them in their screen names, they hold the books up in videos, they have pictures of the authors on their TikToks,” Hill said. “We definitely see a lot of that.”

White supremacist TikTok users direct people to sources of extremist content outside of the app at the end of seemingly normal music videos, including a series titled “Siege” and a book titled “The Turner Diaries,” both of which involve neo-Nazis calling for a race war.

Hill estimates that the white supremacist TikTok users are “young to mid-20s,” although she acknowledged it’s difficult to know for sure since they tend to be anonymous. She said TikTok has been making an effort to remove extremist content from its platform, but the challenge is that when it does remove these accounts, new extremist accounts are created in their place. It is so easy to buy TikTok followers that new accounts can gain 10,000 followers the same day they are made.

“They just create another profile almost immediately and they learn from their mistakes on how they’re caught,” Hill said.

She believes the best way for TikTok to combat hate on its platform is to be aware of the various trends in white supremacist content and techniques to spread that content.

“It’s just absolute constant change in graphic stuff that extremists use on social media,” Hill said. “It comes from the culture of young people creating these new memes and you have to stay on top of it, and they [TikTok] were certainly open to our information and our work and are willing to try. And that’s all you can do.”

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