TikTok to Ban Some Criticisms of Zionism Following Pressure from NGO Backed by Former Israeli Intelligence Officials

In a podcast interview published on Sunday, CyberWell chief executive Tal-Or Cohen stated that TikTok had agreed “off-the-record” to adopt Meta’s policy on criticisms of Zionism.

Meta’s global head of policy development, Dina Hussein (Left), and TikTok’s head of trust & safety partnerships, Valiant Richey (Right), moments after CyberWell founder Tal-Or Cohen spoke on the same panel as part of the September 2023 Eradicate Hate Global Summit.

November 2, 2024: TikTok confirmed this reporting in an October 2, 2024 update to a policy article published the previous year. According to the update: “We [TikTok] also updated our hate speech policy to recognize content that uses ‘Zionist’ as a proxy for a protected attribute when it is not used to refer to a political ideology and instead used and proxy with Jewish or Israeli identity. This policy was implemented early this year after observing a rise in how the word was increasingly used in a hateful way.”

The popular social media platform TikTok has agreed “off-the-record” to enacting the same ban on many criticisms of the Israeli government as was adopted by Meta on July 9, according to a statement from the head of the Israeli pressure group CyberWell published on Sunday. As uncovered by the authors through two reports earlier this month, CyberWell is an offshoot of the Israeli government intelligence collection effort known as Keshet David (“David’s Bow”), which was itself spun out of a larger government propaganda effort now known as Voices of Israel.

CyberWell is one of many nonprofit advocacy groups that has leveraged its role as a trusted ‘counter-disinformation’ and ‘anti-hate’ partner to press for its public policy aims. As we previously reported, CyberWell’s campaigns have included attempts to ban the popular slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” as well as criticisms of the Israeli government’s wartime propaganda, including demonstrably false claims from government officials surrounding the killing of “dozens” of babies on October 7th. CyberWell has also pressed for a ban on discussions of the Israeli government’s enactment of the so-called ‘Hannibal Directive’ preference of killing its own citizens rather than allowing them to be taken hostage.

Meta’s recent policy change, which was championed by CyberWell, bans many critical uses of the term ‘Zionist’ – a reference to those who call for an independent state in the Middle East which privileges Jews over other ethnic groups. Meta’s decision recognized that ‘Zionist’ can be used “as shorthand to refer to governments, soldiers, or other specific groups” and therefore punted on the question of whether to ban the critique that “Zionists are war criminals.”

Listen to the audio here:

Roughly seventeen minutes into an interview with Canadian political consultant Warren Kinsella published on Sunday, CyberWell chief executive Tal-Or Cohen responded to a question on whether other social media platforms would be following Meta’s ban on many criticisms of Zionism by stating:

"We're also a trusted partner of TikTok. And we have been assured by TikTok off-the-record, I'll say off-the-record, that their policy is the same. Meaning they would be treating Zionism in the same way, okay. So I expect that off-the-record you're going to actually be seeing statements about that in the coming days. On the record, I can tell you that we've been reassured by TikTok that they're looking at this statement by Meta and that they intend to provide clarification to the public on it soon, okay."

Ms. Cohen continued that CyberWell plans to fight for the same policies at X and Google: “We all need to look at X and at Google and kind of say … this decision has been widely supported by all of the major Jewish organizations, by a coalition known as the IHRA Coalition,” referencing a pressure campaign for social media platforms to adopt the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) re-definition of antisemitism, for which CyberWell has served as the data provider.

Cohen further stated that: “The next clear move is to call on all social media platforms to actually recognize what is true, which is that ‘Zionist’ is being used as a codeword to spread antisemitism to speak about Jews in hostile and violent ways, and we expect the digital policies that are in place to be applied equally to this form of hate too.”

The host of the interview, Daisy Consulting Group’s Warren Kinsella, was exposed in 2019 for running a smear campaign known as ‘Project Cactus’ to ‘seek and destroy’ the populist People’s Party of Canada and its leader, Maxime Bernier. A source with knowledge of the campaign asserted that Kinsella’s client was the Conservative Party of Canada.

In addition to its ‘trusted partner’ status with Meta and TikTok, CyberWell has also enjoyed close access to U.S. security officials. Ms. Cohen spoke alongside Meta’s global head of policy development, Dina Hussein, and TikTok’s head of trust & safety partnerships, Valiant Richey, during a panel at the Eradicate Hate Global Summit in late September. Beyond participation from multiple FBI agents and an official from the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which has come under criticism for its expansive methods of opposing online disinformation, the summit’s keynote speakers included U.S. homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and former Israeli interior minister Natan Sharansky.

CyberWell’s leadership includes several former high-level Israeli security officials, such as Amos Yadlin, the former head of Israel’s military intelligence directorate, Aman.

Sharansky was influential in the creation of the IHRA redefinition of antisemitism, which he has described as a reaction to a United Nations-backed criticism of the Israeli government as an apartheid state through the 2001 Durban declaration, as well as the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Along with celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz, Sharansky authored the introduction to a 2019 report from Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs – which originally created Voices of Israel – entitled “Behind the Mask: The Antisemitic Nature of BDS Exposed.”

A subsequent report in early 2021, published jointly by the ministries of strategic and diaspora affairs, “The Hate Factor,” laid out the Israeli government’s strategy for pressuring social media companies to adopt the IHRA redefinition of antisemitism. CyberWell is arguably the embodiment of that strategy.

TikTok and CyberWell did not immediately respond to requests for comment. This article will be amended if comments are received after publication.