Pro-Palestinian posts on TikTok continue to vastly outnumber pro-Israel posts, research shows
As the Israel-Hamas war erupted in late 2023, a Northeastern University researcher found pro-Palestinian posts on TikTok vastly outnumbered pro-Israeli posts.
Two years later, the trend continues — for every pro-Israel post that appeared on TikTok in September, there were roughly 17 posts supporting Palestinians.
“The posting activity is quite notable for how much they remain popular topics,” says Laura Edelson, assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern. “Additionally, in terms of views per post, these topics are right back to where they were in October and November 2023.”
Edelson is the co-director of Cybersecurity for Democracy, a research-based effort to expose online threats to our social fabric — and recommend how to counter them.
Last year, she collected data on more than 280,000 TikTok posts from the United States during the first three months of the Israel-Hamas war that had specific hashtags related to the conflict.
In that analysis, Edelson found that the number of pro-Palestinian posts outnumbered pro-Israeli posts by a ratio of 20:1, that pro-Palestinian posts garnered vastly more page views than pro-Israeli posts and that the social media company appeared to amplify the two types of posts equally but at different times.
In advance of the second anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack triggering the war, Edelson revisited the TikTok data to see how discussions around the conflict have evolved.
This time, she found a similar preponderance of pro-Palestinian to pro-Israeli videos in terms of number of posts.
This 17:1 ratio wasn’t commensurate with the traction that the different types of posts gained, however.
Although the average pro-Palestinian post had about 11,500 views compared to the roughly 2,400 views of pro-Israel content, the median pro-Palestinian video attracted 472 views, while the median pro-Israel video had 565 views, according to the report. This was because, although most pro-Israel posts garnered more views than pro-Palestinian ones, all the posts that went viral were pro-Palestinian.
Edelson attributes this to the greater number of pro-Palestinian posts make it more likely one will go viral and skew the average viewership.
“Think of going viral like winning the lottery,” Edelson explains. “But there are 17 times more pro-Palestinian lottery tickets than pro-Israel tickets.”
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TikTok’s algorithm and younger user base may partially explain this effect, Edelson says.
Recent surveys have shown that across party lines, young Americans have become markedly more critical of the Israeli government and more sympathetic to Palestinian civilians, Edelson notes.
And while other video social media platforms like YouTube feed a user content associated with friends or niche interests, TikTok is “inherently majoritarian,” and “a topic-focused platform,” Edelson says.
“TikTok wants to find the thing that will be really, really broadly popular,” Edelson says. “On a platform like TikTok — unlike a platform like YouTube — it’s not about lots of things being seen by 3 million people; it’s about a tiny number of things being seen by 20 million people.”
Edelson says that means it’s “very, very difficult” for minority views to go viral because they will appeal to a lower number of people.
“It has a lower ceiling of how many people are even eligible to see it,” Edelson explains.
In line with this, Edelson found that pro-Palestinian videos earned higher likes and shares per view (12.6 and 0.2 per hundred, respectively) than pro-Israeli videos (8.5 and 0.1 per hundred).
And counter the metaphor of social media as a “digital town square” where topics can be debated, Edelson found that the pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian content was hardly in dialogue.
“It’s better to think of them as two separate topics,” she noted.
“There are almost no videos with both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine hashtags in our dataset,” the report notes. “The small number that did appear appeared to all be hashtag farming, to the extent that we used this as an exclusion criteria.”
