Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) signaled over the weekend that it was time to start cracking down on Chinese-controlled TikTok in the wake of Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attacks because of the content that the company is promoting.
Murphy’s remarks during a Sunday interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” with host Dana Bash come as numerous officials have accused the company of being a propaganda tool of the Chinese Communist Party.
“Senator, we have seen an alarming spike in antisemitism, hate against Jews, across the United States, but particularly on college campuses,” Bash said. “You also sit on the Senate committee that deals with education.”
“What’s gone so wrong on America’s college campuses that you have students openly applauding the terrorist killings of 1,200 or more civilians?” she asked.
Murphy responded, “Listen, I’m all for free speech on our campuses, but I have been very disappointed at the response of many of our University officials. There’s a direct line between some of the most vicious antisemitism speech happening on our campus and threats of violence to synagogues and to Jewish communities. I ultimately think we need to sort of think really hard about the way in which our young people are receiving information about this conflict.”
“We need to hold accountable the social media sites, in particular, TikTok, which is just full of virulent pro-Hamas and antisemitic material. The college campuses need to have a better means of accountability for this kind of hate speech,” he continued. “But we also have to recognize that these young people are getting their information from somewhere, often from a Chinese-controlled social media platform that has in its interests trying to turn Americans against each other. And one of the means they may be doing that is trying to promote a lot of pretty hateful and divisive material about the conflict in Gaza.”
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