Every reasonable adult with even limited exposure to TikTok knows its political content skews to the far, Clown World left. This is how the topic of the app’s ban became politicized, after all, and why left wing journalists so often defend the right of an authoritarian prison state to sell its spyware unencumbered into US markets. But separate from the endlessly fascinating, furry-adjacent “frog/frogs pronoun” discourse, few topics on the Chinese spy app are so wildly divorced from reality as Israel. With over half of Zoomers using TikTok as their primary search engine, most of us saw the next bit coming, but the results are no less difficult to stomach: a recent Harvard/Harris survey found 51% of young people consider Hamas’s 10/7 mass murder justified.

If there were a terrorist attack in Times Square tomorrow, how many scantily-clad TikTokers would be dancing in defense of it by Friday?

We tend to blame this generational divide on a couple of convenient villains: first, our impressionable young minds are being shaped by an evil algorithm. Second, let’s talk about the spy app’s mysterious cabal of “content moderators” (CCP agents). But while I do think the algos are fucked, and believe the spy app should be banned, my sense is our deranged, divergent youth perspective is just what happens in a global information market.