"Still, TikTok’s opponents hadn’t relented. Jacob Helberg, a member of a congressional research and advisory panel called the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, has been working on building a bipartisan, bicoastal alliance of China hawks, united in part by their desire to ban TikTok. Over the past year, he says, he has met with more than 100 members of Congress, and brought up TikTok with all of them.
Some lawmakers built momentum for the bill by holding hearings to introduce their colleagues to arguments against TikTok, Helberg said. He also co-hosted a hearing that focused in part on TikTok.
It was slow going until Oct. 7. The attack that day in Israel by Hamas and the ensuing conflict in Gaza became a turning point in the push against TikTok, Helberg said. People who historically hadn’t taken a position on TikTok became concerned with how Israel was portrayed in the videos and what they saw as an increase in antisemitic content posted to the app.
Anthony Goldbloom, a San Francisco-based data scientist and tech executive, started analyzing data TikTok published in its dashboard for ad buyers showing the number of times users watched videos with certain hashtags. He found far more views for videos with pro-Palestinian hashtags than those with pro-Israel hashtags. While the ratio fluctuated, he found that at times it ran 69 to 1 in favor of videos with pro-Palestinian hashtags."
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