In a private call Wednesday evening, more than a dozen Jewish celebrities and TikTok creators addressed rising antisemitism on the social media platform.
Speaking to TikTok executives, actors Sacha Baron Cohen, Debra Messing, and Amy Schumer were among the 30 people in the meeting led by Adam Presser, TikTok’s head of operations, and Seth Melnick, its global head of user operations, according to the New York Times. The company set up the call in response to an open letter sent by creators last week urging TikTok to take action.
The executives reportedly opened the call to learn what creators on the app were experiencing and how they could improve it.
“What is happening at TikTok is it is creating the biggest antisemitic movement since the Nazis,” Cohen, who NYT noted does not seem to have an official TikTok account, said. “Shame on you,” the actor directed at Presser when criticizing the rampant misinformation on the app. Cohen also claimed that the platform could “flip a switch” to fix growing antisemitism.
Presser, who along with Melnick is also Jewish, said that while there is no “magic button,” there was “truth” to Cohen’s comments that social media companies needed to take more initiative.
Messing, who has more than TikTok 37,000 followers, urged executives to address the platform’s moderation of the slogan “from the river to the sea,” which the Anti-Defamation League has called an antisemitic call used in anti-Israel campaigns. The slogan has reportedly been posted in messages and comments to many Jewish TikTok users, regardless of their original post’s content.
“Where it is clear exactly what they mean — ‘kill the Jews, eradicate the state of Israel’ — that content is violative and we take it down,” Presser told the group, stating the phrase was up for interpretation by TikTok’s moderators. “Our approach up until Oct. 7, continuing to today, has been that for instances where people use the phrase where it’s not clear, where someone is just using it casually, then that has been considered acceptable speech.”
Messing asked the company to reconsider its policy and argued it was “much more responsible to bar it at this juncture than to say, ‘Oh, well, some people, they use it in a different way than it actually was created to mean.’” The actress continued, “I understand that you are in a very, very difficult and complicated place, but you also are the main platform for the dissemination of Jew hate.”
In a statement, TikTok claimed: “We don’t allow content with this phrase when it’s used in a way that threatens violence and spreads hate.”
Social media platforms are struggling to keep up with the influx of misinformation, antisemitic and Islamophobic hate speech that has spread following the start of the Israel-Hamas war. X, Meta, and YouTube have also been affected, with all four companies, including TikTok, receiving warnings from the European Commission that the spread of misinformation, as well as violent and hateful content, may place them in violation of the EU’s Digital Services Act.
