WEST BANK (Dispatches) – A glimpse into the scale of the Zionist regime’s crackdown on social media users was given with the revelation that the occupying regime is one of the world’s leaders in demanding the removal of videos from the TikTok social media platform.
According to a report in the Jerusalem Post, TikTok received 2,713 requests from governments around the world to remove or limit content or accounts in the third quarter of 2022. The company removed 110,954,663 videos uploaded to the platform worldwide during this time, roughly one percent of all the videos uploaded to TikTok.
Of the videos that were removed, 80.1 percent were removed before even viewing the entire video, while 89.8 percent were removed within 24 hours. Two percent are said to have been removed worldwide due to hateful content.
In the case of the Zionist regime, 252 official requests were submitted, making it one of the leaders cracking down on TikTok videos. The figure represents 9.2 percent of the total number of requests to TikTok worldwide. By way of comparison, the U.S. had 13, Canada five, France 27, the UK 71 and Germany 167 applications which were submitted on behalf of their respective governments.
Zionist groups have claimed that the number represents a worrying trend in the rise of anti-Semitism on social media. The regime’s Knesset’s Committee on Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora and the World Zionist Organization met representatives from TikTok to deal with what was described as “anti-Semitic discourse in the digital space”.
Critics have argued that the high number of removals related to the occupying regime is less to do with anti-Semitism and more to do with the silencing of criticism of the apartheid regime. The occupying regime has long campaigned for the adoption of a definition of anti-Semitism which conflates legitimate criticism of the occupying regime with unacceptable anti-Jewish racism.
Social media giants have adopted the definition produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Seven of the eleven examples cited in the controversial definition conflate criticism of the regime with anti-Semitism. The man who took the lead role in drafting the “working definition”, Kenneth Stern, has said that it has been “weaponized in an attempt to silence critics of Zionism.”