Anyone uncritically praising Osama bin Laden is a dumbass.

For the record, it wasn’t even trending on TikTok until the moral panic started. Someone made a mashup of a few randos’ posts and that went viral on X. Then, every newspaper amplified that with silly rage bait articles for old people. Then, to make matters worse, the Guardian foolishly took the letter off their site and drew it even more attention.

So, the actual story isn’t that the kids were all supporting Al Qaeda. It’s that adults took some blue check grifter’s rage bait and turned into a whole media narrative that will probably now never die.

I would like to actually read the letter but can't find it online. Anyone got a link?

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The social media platform TikTok said it is “aggressively” removing content that praises Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America.”

The letter, published about a year after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, was bin Laden’s attempt to justify the targeting and killing of American civilians.

“Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism,” TikTok Policy posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

In the post, “the media” references frustration from users aimed at The Guardian, which released a statement Wednesday that it removed a “previously displayed document” that contained the translated version of bin Laden’s letter.

The news organization said it published the letter the same day that bin Laden released it — Nov. 24, 2002 — and removed it Wednesday after the transcript had been “widely shared on social media without the full context.”

A nationwide poll released Thursday by Quinnipiac University, found that among voters aged 18-34, sympathy for Israelis sank from last month.

The original article contains 368 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 55%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

TikTok is doing anything that drives engagement. I would wager that "aggressively" means hardly or not at all in this context.