Israeli former TikTok employee says 'free and democratic West' should end online anonymity to fight online anti-Israel bias

In an interview with Israel HaYom, former TikTok employee Barak Herscowitz said that to combat antisemitism and anti-Israel bias online, social media companies should end online anonymity.

“The free and democratic West must understand that it is dealing with something very big,” said Herscowitz, who formerly worked on the Israeli government’s COVID-19 public relations team under then-Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.

“We need to rethink the question of who can post on these networks,” he continued. “Perhaps it is not right for every anonymous person to be able to post any content they want, perhaps an authentication model is needed. It won't solve all the problems, but it would be a start.”

Herscowitz’s comments came amid a discussion about how to deal with anti-Israel content online.

After resigning from TikTok in August over claims of the company’s anti-Israel bias, Herscowitz tweeted the following: “I quit TikTok. We live in a time when our very existence as Jews and Israelis is under attack and in danger. In such an unstable era, people’s priorities become sharper. Am Yisrael Chai.”

Herscowitz accused TikTok of not seriously addressing anti-Israel content on the platform, and disproportionately banning or restricting pro-Israel accounts.

He also said that among “Palestinian groups” within TikTok, one group was “celebrating the release of the Palestinian female terrorists.”

After putting together a document about this and sending it to senior management in TikTok, Herscowitz said he “felt a sense of pressure and hostility towards” him, and “didn’t receive serious answers.”

Herscowitz said he received an email saying that “it’s possible we won't be able to tell you what steps we're taking to address what you wrote.”

After parts of the document he put together went public, TikTok responded by denying Herscowitz’s claims.

Shortly after TikTok’s public response, Herscowitz resigned.

Instead of simply advocating for free speech within the current legal limits, however, Herscowitz argued users should no longer be able to create anonymous accounts, and that “we need to rethink the question of who can post on these networks.”

He also stated that TikTok’s “content censorship” is fine “in principle,” but becomes a problem when “the censorship is so biased and one-sided.”

“The Western, democratic world is engaged in a war it doesn’t know it’s a part of, a war over consciousness,” Herscowitz said.

“I hope we win in Gaza with the help of planes and tanks, but Hamas is also waging another war against us, aimed at eroding us, eroding support for us, weakening us legally, publicly, and consciously, and turning us into a leper state. These things are happening primarily on social networks because that's where young people in the West consume information and news today."

Regarding accusations of Chinese government influence on the platform, Herscowitz affirmed he “did not see interference from the Chinese government in the app.”

In response to Herscowitz’s allegations of anti-Israel bias, TikTok declared it has actively opposed pro-Hamas content on the platform, and removed millions of videos that violate its “Community Guidelines.”

“In the first six months since the outbreak of the war, we removed more than 3.1 million videos and suspended more than 140,000 live streams in the area of Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank for violating our Community Guidelines, including content promoting Hamas, hate speech, violent extremism, and misinformation,” the social media platform stated.

TikTok also said that “the claims of the former employee, who did not work on our platform safety or content moderation teams, misrepresent the efforts and resources we rapidly deployed to maintain the safety of our community and the integrity of our platform.”