Hillary Clinton Is Still Blaming TikTok
She's back.
Hillary Clinton is once again opining on a topic near and dear to her heart: the spread of misinformation on social media, which is a major cause of people adopting policy views that Clinton does not agree with. She is the archetypal political figure utterly convinced she would be president of the U.S. if only the voters stopped listening to social media and instead received all their news and information from the traditional media's credentialed experts.
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Earlier this week, Clinton spoke at the Israel Hayom Summit to explain why she thinks people, especially young people—many of them Jewish Americans—have turned against Israel over the war in Gaza. Spoiler: She thinks it's all TikTok's fault.
Hillary Clinton blames TikTok and "totally made up" videos for young people's views on Israel and Palestine.
She says social media influenced "not just the usual suspects" but also "young Jewish Americans who don't know the history and don't understand." https://t.co/rUVXRqK2rK pic.twitter.com/hAwG7Gbhwf
— Prem Thakker (@prem_thakker) December 2, 2025
This is a very familiar refrain from Clinton, of course. When she lost the 2016 election, she blamed it all on Facebook, and in particular, Russian bots that supposedly flooded the platform with pro-Trump and anti-Clinton content. If people had put their faith in respectable news outlets, they wouldn't have fallen for the lies of social media, which pollute American democracy and embolden foreign manipulators, according to Clinton.
Unfortunately, mainstream and establishment news outlets got the Russian influence story very, very wrong: It turned out that foreign influence on social media was much less voluminous than previously acknowledged. One mainstream organization that performed herculean work setting the record straight, The Washington Post, concluded that "content from the news media and U.S. politicians dwarfed the amount of Russian influence content the electorate was exposed to during the 2016 race."
Which is a long way of saying that Clinton is drawing on a very familiar and flawed grievance. Now she's back at it again, insisting that young people have developed hostile views toward Israel because TikTok is manipulating them by biasing the content against Israel.
This elides the fact that mainstream sources of information also manifest bias—a bias toward government action, especially when it comes to foreign policy. This often takes the form of a bias toward military intervention and against peace. Recall, for instance, the Iraq War, when even liberal media largely marched in lockstep with the administration.
Social media, by extension, is freewheeling and encompasses many other perspectives—some of which are wrong, or biased, or even malicious. But the good thing about social media is that everyone can use it. On the topic at hand, pro-Israel sources are just as capable of flooding the platforms with content that supports their worldview. Indeed, social media encompasses legacy media—these sources can use the sites as well to further their agendas.
The problem for the Clintons of the word is simply that their side is losing the argument. If people are disillusioned with the Israeli government's treatment of the Palestinians, it's probably because they have been shown images of starving and dying children. The suffering of Palestinian civilians—tens of thousands of whom have died—is surely the relevant factor here. Reporting on, and in particular, images of, atrocities committed in Vietnam helped turn the tide of American public opinion against involvement in that war. If social media had existed then, it's quite possible that public opinion would have shifted more rapidly.
If TikTok's algorithm is biasing the content in favor of images of Palestinian misery, perhaps then Clinton would have an argument. No one has presented any proof of this, however. Moreover, social media sites that are not run by foreign governments hostile to use interests—such as X and Instagram—have similar levels of Israel-critical content. That's because the content is popular; Americans are quite upset that their tax dollars are being sent overseas to aid Israel's wars.
Clinton can hate the messenger all she wants. But that's all she's doing: complaining that people don't agree with her, and pretending that it's because they've been manipulated.
Reason Versus!
It's not too late—you can still get tickets to an excellent upcoming Reason Versus event: Ryan Grim and Emily Jashinsky of Breaking Points vs. Elizabeth Nolan Brown and me. We'll be debating whether Big Tech is good or bad.
Oh, now it's on! ???????????? pic.twitter.com/pH0LlCm2zU
— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) December 3, 2025
Tickets are available here. The event will be live in Washington, D.C. on December 10, 2025, at 7 p.m.
This Week on Free Media
I am once again joined by Niall Stanage and Amber Duke to discuss the big stories of the week. Watch here:
Worth Watching
I am a Marvel completionist, and so I finally got around to watching Fantastic Four: First Steps. I was never a big fan of the Fantastic Four, and I mostly dislike the retro-futurism of the 1960s and 70s, which is the artistic style of this film. In other words, it had plenty going against it, in my book. And so, yeah…I really didn't like it. Was I offended? No. Would I watch it again? Absolutely not. Some specific complaints:
- Reed Richards barely used his powers! Why was this man not bending and stretching literally all the time?
- They made Sue Storm practically indistinguishable from the Scarlett Witch. (It didn't help that the two actresses look a lot alike.) Sue Storm used her glowing forcefield magic against Galactus in basically the same way that Scarlet Witch did against Thanos.
- Galactus was deeply uninteresting, and his backstory went completely unexplored.
- The people of Earth were temporarily mad that their all-powerful saviors, who do everything for them, weren't willing to sacrifice their newborn baby? Ridiculous.
- The politics of this earth made very little sense. This is why I dislike retro-futurism: It naively assumes a progressive utopia will somehow take hold across the globe.
- Most of the technology felt like cheating. Faster-than-light travel, and teleportation? But also, people watch local television? Stupid.
I take it back, I was offended.
