Pro-Israel lobby's footprint writ large in law banning TikTok

Two American lawmakers, who co-authored a controversial law aiming to ban TikTok in the US, received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign funding from the pro-Israel lobby, according to official records.

Mike Gallagher, a Republican, who recently resigned from Congress, and Raja Krishnamoorthi, a member of the Democratic Party, have staunchly backed the idea of banning the popular video-sharing app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.

Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi received $198,000 in campaign contributions from pro-Israel groups for the 2023-2024 election cycle, according to Open Secrets, which compiles the data based on the Federal Election Commission record.

In recent weeks, US lawmakers, including top officials such as US Secretary Antony Blinken, have openly voiced concern about Palestinian voices dominating the TikTok conversation and opposition to the Israeli war growing on US campuses.

“We have heard many senators and many lobbyists in the US who have expressed clearly that they also see TikTok to be a reason why students are suddenly protesting in great numbers for Palestine and against genocide,” says Jalal Abukhater, advocacy manager at 7amleh.

“They consider TikTok to be a biased place that is amplifying more pro-Palestine viewpoints than pro-Israel.”

Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi co-wrote the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in late April after it was rushed through Congress.

The law calls upon ByteDance to shut down TikTok in the US or sell it to American investors within a year. TikTok has more than 170 million American users, many of whom have criticised the decision to ban the app, which Biden’s own campaign managers use to woo young voters.

TikTok and its parent ByteDance have challenged the law at a US court. They have been joined by content creators who say the ban violates their constitutional rights.

In a statement issued soon after ByteDance sued the US government, Krishnamoorti alleged the company is controlled by the Communist Party of China, and his bill had received overwhelming support from American lawmakers.

“Instead of continuing its deceptive tactics, it’s time for ByteDance to start the divestment process,” he said.

A closer look into the company shows that Krishnamoorti’s assessment is not entirely correct. According to Bloomberg, Beijing does not have total sway over the company since outside investors such as Carlyle and General Atlantic own 60 percent of ByteDance shares.

Krishnamoorthi, an American of Indian descent, is a known China hawk. He’s a ranking member of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the US and Chinese Community Party.

Serving his fourth term as an elected representative from Illinois state, Krishnamoorthi has received funding from the US-based arm of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a far-right Hindu supremacist organisation in India.

Krishnamoorthi has frequently travelled to India, where he met Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose government banned TikTok in 2020 after a border skirmish with Chinese troops.

While pro-Israel groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee contributed more than $2.2 billion to the campaigns of dozens of lawmakers, the connection between the TikTok ban and the public outcry over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has put a spotlight on Gallagher and Krishnamoorti.

Former US President Donald Trump’s administration tried banning TikTok in 2020, but a federal judge blocked the move.

China and the US, the two largest economies, have been locked in a battle of geopolitical and economic influence. The US has blocked the supply of key semiconductor technology to Chinese firms in a bid to slow their advances in AI and other prized tech.

TikTok has become immensely popular because of its For You Page, which hooks users onto the screens and is powered by a powerful proprietary AI.

Washington fears that Beijing can collect data on US citizens who use TikTok.

“Similar claims have been made about companies in the US. There have been issues with WhatsApp and Google. Online platforms have done data harvesting, and Meta is not innocent either,” says Abukhater.

A war in short clips

Calls to take action against TikTok gained momentum soon after disturbing images of charred and dismembered bodies of civilians and flattened apartment buildings began pouring out of Gaza.

Israel attacked the Palestinian enclave after Hamas fighters infiltrated across the border and killed 1,200 people in Israeli settlements. Tel Aviv’s following onslaught has been what human rights activists are calling a genocide. The Israeli military has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children.

Pro-Israel politicians, with their voices amplified by media, started accusing TikTok of giving more space to Palestinian voices and deliberately censoring the Israeli point of view.

In a November article, Mike Gallagher, who last week joined a venture capital firm TitletownTech, alleged that TikTok was being used to spread anti-Israeli propaganda and brainwash young Americans who are “hooked on the app before their seventeenth birthday”.

This was followed by Democratic Representative Josh Gottheimer saying in an X post: “TikTok has been pushing antisemitic, anti-Israel, anti-American, and pro-Hamas content.”

But overwhelming evidence suggests that TikTok users have organically taken up the cause of Palestinians in Gaza as they can see traditional Western media whitewashing Israeli war crimes, says Abukhater.

The Israeli military has killed nearly 100 Palestinian journalists in Gaza since the outbreak of the war on October 7, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. In the absence of reporters on the ground, civilians have lived-stream the destruction and massacre carried out by the Israeli troops.

This has had a tremendous impact on Gen Z’s understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As American public opinion has shifted, pro-Israeli lawmakers have worried that Tel Aviv is failing to peddle its narrative.

In a recent interview, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was asked by Senator Mitt Romney - a Republican lawmaker close to Israel - why Washington’s PR has been weak in backing the Israeli war in Gaza.

“The way this has played out on social media has dominated the narrative. You have a social media environment in which context, history, facts, get lost — and the emotion, the impact of images dominates.”

Romney quickly followed, saying there’s no wonder why there’s support to ban TikTok, where an “overwhelming” number of Palestinians are posting.