The new fashion influencer on TikTok social networks is. . . Osama bin Laden. Yes, the terrorist he planned on 9/11 went viral this week, and not in a good way. Users have been posting videos on the Chinese-owned app, urging their followers to read bin Laden’s 2002 “letter to the United States,” while suggesting he was onto something. “I will never see this country with the same eyes,” said one user.
The videos racked up hundreds of thousands of views. TikTok said Thursday that it is “aggressively removing” such content. “The number of videos on TikTok is small and reporting on trends on our platform is inaccurate,” the company said. He then blamed critics and journalists for noticing, saying all the attention was driving more traffic to the publications. The British newspaper The Guardian unpublished its copy of Bin Laden’s letter, published in 2002, because it was being “widely shared on social media without full context.”
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