Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently told a group of “influencers” gathered at Israel’s Consulate General in New York that TikTok was the most important “weapon” in the propaganda war.<\/p>\n
Public support for Israel<\/a> in the United States<\/a>\u00a0has reached historic lows.<\/p>\n A Gallup poll<\/a> in July found that 32 percent of Americans approve of the Israeli campaign in Gaza<\/a>, while 60 percent disapprove, a 10 percent drop in support from the previous September.<\/p>\n Pew Research Center findings<\/a>\u00a0showed that a third of American adults (33 percent) say the country sends Israel too much military aid, a larger portion of the population than those who say the US provides the right amount (23 percent) or not enough (8 percent).<\/p>\n A majority<\/a> of Americans hold a negative view of Israel and report being “extremely” or “very” concerned about its military strikes killing Palestinian<\/a> civilians and about starvation<\/a> among Palestinians in Gaza.<\/p>\n A New York Times\/Siena poll<\/a>\u00a0revealed that there are slightly more Americans who sympathise with the Palestinians than those who sympathise with Israel.<\/p>\n Israel’s popularity crisis is particularly acute among young Americans, with only nine percent of those aged 18 to 34<\/a> backing Israel’s military action in the Strip. Forty-two percent of those in the 18 to 29 cohort<\/a> say the US grants Israel too much military aid, compared to 21 percent whose opinion is that the US is giving the right amount or too little.<\/p>\n One influential ghoul after another – from Hillary Clinton<\/a> to wealthy tech investors<\/a>\u00a0and members of Congress – has attributed this shift to TikTok, as if American youth are incapable of independently concluding that it is wrong to repeatedly set fire to tents<\/a> filled with displaced persons.<\/p>\n Amid the decline in pro-Israel sentiment, which is functionally the same<\/a> as a decline in support for US imperialism in and beyond the Middle East, the US ruling class is aggressively asserting control over powerful media organs.<\/p>\n On 25 September, US President Donald Trump<\/a> issued an executive order<\/a> mandating that for TikTok to continue operating in the US, one or more Americans had to own the majority of the platform.<\/p>\n Trump’s actions, it is worth noting, build on the Biden administration’s\u00a0approach to TikTok<\/a>, which also called for US control of the app, a position with bipartisan support in Congress.<\/p>\n Accordingly, a group of US investors led by the software firm Oracle<\/a> is taking control of 65 percent of TikTok.<\/p>\n Oracle is set to oversee TikTok’s US operations, provide cloud services for user data storage and secure a licence to take charge of the app’s algorithm.<\/p>\n Oracle founder Larry Ellison<\/a> is one of the top donors to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF), a US nonprofit that effectively subsidises the Israeli military. He has said that he feels a “deep emotional connection to the State of Israel” and “we”, seemingly a reference to Oracle, will “do everything we can to support the country of Israel”.<\/p>\n A similar process has unfolded in traditional news media. In August, the Ellison family’s media company, Skydance – an outfit financially supported by Larry Ellison and run by his son, David – acquired Paramount, a movie studio that owns CBS and a host of cable channels.<\/p>\n Bari Weiss, a talentless behind-kisser<\/a> and tattle-tale passionately opposed<\/a> to free speech and to Palestinian freedom, has been named CBS News’s editor-in-chief.<\/p>\n Now, the Ellison family has its sights set on Warner Bros Discovery, which owns HBO, TBS and CNN.<\/p>\n While there is ample space for pro-Palestine messaging on TikTok, it is not as if traditional news outlets like CBS have a record of supporting Palestinian liberation.<\/p>\n CBS, like all major corporate media<\/a> in the United States, far more often than not produces content favourable to US-Israeli objectives in West Asia.<\/p>\n For example, in the last year, the CBS News website ran 2,575 stories that mention Gaza, with only 388 containing the word “genocide”.<\/p>\n In other words, in a period that mostly predates the Ellison-Weiss regime, only 15 percent of the site’s Gaza coverage mentioned the crime of crimes, even as one credible source after another has concluded<\/a> that Israel has carried out a genocide in the Strip.<\/p>\nControl of the narrative<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Media capture<\/strong><\/h2>\n