The Real Reason Osama Bin Laden’s Letter Went Viral on TikTok

A few days ago, a very common thing happened on the Internet: A group of people seized on a provocative piece of information, consumed it without context and ricocheted it around.

In this case, it was a contingent of young TikTokers who discovered a 2002 letter by Osama bin Laden justifying the 9/11 attacks. With little sensitivity or mindfulness toward historic context, those TikTokers published a slew of videos that lent support to bin Laden’s comments.

By Tuesday, they had sparked a minor trend on the app, gathering around 2 million views, according to data collected by the Washington Post. (For context, true TikTok virality gets measured in hundreds of millions of views, or at least tens of millions, and a popular star like Charli D’Amelio often receives more than 20 million views on a single video.)

Then something else happened that’s increasingly common: The media focused its attention on the trend and supersized it. The inciting incident was likely a post on X from the journalist Yashar Ali, which has been viewed nearly 40 million times. Ali enjoys an expansive audience with almost 720,000 followers and is widely followed by other journalists.

“There is a clear relationship between Yashar Ali's tweet and the increase in related activity” that fueled the bin Laden TikTok videos, Eric Curwin, who studies disinformation as the chief technology officer of Washington, D.C.-based Pyraa Technologies, told The Messenger. 

News stories about the TikTok videos started on Wednesday, and by Thursday, the bin Laden videos had 14 million views before the app began restricting their spread.

Some observers have wondered aloud whether the surge of bin Laden videos were the result of a shadowy government playing digital puppet master — a fear that has echoed around the internet as the coverage intensified. But the data indicates nothing grander than another episode like NyQuil Chicken mania, with the media seizing an alluring storyline and amplifying it. 

Curwin and other experts have found no evidence that some outside force boosted the bin Laden videos, or that the app was promoting them. “The accounts I’ve seen participating don’t strike me as particularly suspicious,” disinformation researcher Abbie Richards told The Messenger. “This is how memes work on TikTok.” 

TikTok nonetheless finds itself in a precarious position. The Chinese-owned app has spent years trying to assuage mounting worries from D.C. lawmakers that the Chinese government has a hand in its operations. (TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has consistently denied that.) Those concerns have intensified in recent weeks as the app has become a notable hotbed for pro-Palestine content, with TikTok’s young users channeling that generation’s support for Palestine amid the Israel-Hamas war. 

Just like the bin Laden videos, researchers have found no evidence that this pro-Palestine content has been amplified by some nefarious third-party or TikTok itself.

“People are extremely upset, traumatized from what they’ve been seeing online, furious with their government’s response and feeling powerless. Those conditions create a perfect storm for a trend like this to emerge,” Richards said.