In a conversation with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Sen. Mitt
Romney (R-UT) acknowledged that banning TikTok has such strong support
in Congress because the social media platform has hurt Israel’s public
relations battle.

“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut
down, potentially, TikTok or other entities of that nature,” Romney
said at the McCain Institute this past Friday. “If you look at the
postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative
to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok
broadcasts.”

The official justification for targeting TikTok is the unfounded
allegation that it’s a Chinese spy tool because its parent company,
ByteDance, is based in China. But Romney’s comments suggest the real
purpose of the renewed push to ban the app after a similar effort
failed years ago was to censor news coming out of Gaza and
pro-Palestinian content.

Blinken blamed social media in general when asked by Romney why Israel
was losing the global PR war. Palestinian journalists have been able
to broadcast to the whole world the atrocities committed by Israel in
Gaza using social media, including graphic videos of dead or wounded
children being dug out of rubble following an Israeli airstrike.

“Now, of course, we’re on an intravenous feed of information with new
impulses, inputs every millisecond,” Blinken said. “And, of course,
the way this has played out on social media has dominated the
narrative. You have a social media ecosystem, environment in which
context, history, facts get lost and the emotion, the impact of images
dominate. We can’t discount that, but I think it also has a very very
challenging effect on the narrative.”

A bill to ban TikTok was included in the $95 billion foreign military
spending package President Biden signed into law last month. The
legislation gives ByteDance nine months to sell TikTok, or else it
will get banned. But ByteDance has vowed to fight the ban in court and
said it would rather shutdown TikTok than sell.

https://news.antiwar.com/2024/05/06/mitt-romney-says-congress-supports-banning-tiktok-for-israel/