I’m used to hearing politicians say crazy stuff. But this one still shocked me.
At the latest Republican presidential debate, Nikki Haley renewed her calls to ban TikTok. She did so in the context of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, where pro-Palestine and anti-Israel content has spread like wildfire on TikTok. Meanwhile, young people do hold some shockingly radical beliefs on this issue, with many disturbingly believing the Hamas terrorist attack against Israeli civilians on October 7 was justified.
Nikki Haley tried to use that very real issue and some… interesting… statistics to argue again that the US government needs to “ban” TikTok.
“We really do need to ban TikTok once and for all, and let me tell you why,” she said. “For every 30 minutes that someone watches TikTok every day, they become 17% more antisemitic, more pro-Hamas.”
You know how sometimes you hear a statistic and your BS alarm just starts ringing? Like, that couldn’t possibly be true?
This was one of those times for me. So, I decided to track down the source for Nikki Haley’s claim—and spoiler alert, it did not back her up. At all.
The apparent source for this claim is a data analysis posted by someone named Anthony Goldblum.
He looked at survey data on young people’s social media habits and survey data on their views on Israel/Palestine. He then compared young people who use TikTok 30 minutes or more a day to those who do not use TikTok. He found that the group that uses TikTok is 17% more likely to hold antisemitic or anti-Israel views than the group that does not.
This is your first problem. “Antisemitic or anti-Israel views” is lumped in as one category. But Nikki Haley just said anti-Semitic views. Some people who are anti-Israel are, of course, anti-Semitic. But sympathizing with the Palestinians or opposing the actions of Israel’s government is not inherently antiSemitic, and there are many Jews who hold “anti-Israel” views.
The lumping in of these two categories makes the entire data analysis basically useless, in my opinion.
But even if you ignore this giant problem with the data, as Nikki Haley did, she’s still wrong. Because the data provided here are a correlation, not a causation. All this data shows is that the group that uses TikTok is more likely to hold these views, not that TikTok usage causes people to hold these views.
This is statistics 101.
Let me give you a helpful example. What if I showed you data that said people who watched CNN every night are 30% more likely to vote Democratic. Does that prove that watching CNN changes peoples’ votes? No. It could also be that people who vote Democrat already are more likely to watch CNN, because of its liberal bias, than those who don’t vote for Democrats. Or, there could be some third, confounding variable at play here that explains the correlation. The data alone do not prove any causation.
Again, this is statistics 101.
The same thing is probably happening here with TikTok. TikTok users tend to be much more left-wing than normal people. And, this is an oversimplification but to some degree, the further Left people are, the more likely they are to side with Palestine and oppose Israel. So, it’s just as likely that people who hold these views are just more likely to be on TikTok as it is that TikTok is somehow making people more anti-Semitic.
Of course, I don’t entirely discount the fact that if a lot of anti-Israel or anti-Semitic content is being spread on TikTok, that some people who see that content might become more anti-Israel or anti-Semitic in their views. But there’s no factual basis to claim any sort of 17% increase whatsoever, and any relationship here is purely speculative.
The company that did the survey even told NBC News that Nikki Haley “twist[ed] those inferences beyond the point of recognition. What she said was incorrect.”
We can have a debate over whether the US should ban TikTok. Personally, I am not a fan of TikTok. I think it is a cesspool of left-wing insanity and depraved attention-seeking. So much so that I’ve dedicated part of my coverage as a creator to pushing back on the lunacy coming out of TikTok.
Yet I still don’t support banning it. I think the concerns about national security, while largely speculative about bad things that could hypothetically happen rather than rooted in bad things that have happened, are still valid. But I think these concerns can be addressed through much less drastic measures than the federal government banning an entire communications platform, like prohibiting it on government devices and from use by government employees.
And I think Americans have a First Amendment right to express themselves on TikTok and that the government banning a platform because it dislikes the messages expressed on it is a very, very dangerous precedent to set. Would Republicans be comfortable with President Biden banning Facebook because too many conservative memes are being spread on there? He could just as easily claim that they’re racist and spreading racism, after all, since that’s fundamentally subjective.
But to the people who want to ban TikTok, let’s have that debate. Yet at the bare minimum, that debate should be grounded in reality—not in emotional demagoguery that inaccurately manipulates data.
Do better, Nikki.
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