Following the Hamas attacks that killed more than 1,200 Israelis last weekend and the resulting warfare, users around the world have turned to social media for updates on the situation. On TikTok, one of the most popular social media apps, users who searched for terms like “Palestine” and “Israel” have been presented not only with video clips by users opining on the conflict, but with videos—some replete with graphic images and biased or misleading information—that users paid TikTok to promote on its platform, Fortune has found.
Among these sponsored videos is one from the user “eye.on.palestine,” featuring a montage of dead children, explosions and bombed out cityscapes with the caption, “please give my country and my people the power to push through the hard times it has to go through due to Israel” with the ominous call: “let us show the world what we are capable of.” (Eye on Palestine did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.)
Searches for terms like “Palestine,” “Israel,” “Israel Palestine,” “Israel war,” on TikTok turned up numerous examples of such sponsored content, mixed in with other user-created videos. In most cases viewed by Fortune, the sponsored videos appear to have been created by ordinary users. But thanks to TikTok’s “Promote” feature, these users have been able to inject their views into the conversation, gaining prominent placement in these highly trafficked and highly political searches, for just a few dollars.
Joseph Peretz, a self-proclaimed Jesus lover and Staten Island, New York-based public transit operator, paid $7 to promote a selfie video of him praying for Israel. This video appeared when users searched “Israel” on the app earlier this week, garnering 135,000 views (as compared to his usual prayer videos that often get fewer than 500 views). “I started doing advertising and talking on TikTok because I wanted people to hear the message of Jesus,” Peretz told Fortune.
According to marketing expert Yu Yang Pei, serving up sponsored content in these search results is something that can be done easily and cheaply with TikTok’s “Promote” function. For as little as $7, TikTok users can garner thousands of views on TikTok, opening a low-cost pathway to spread propaganda on hot-button topics.
“A person that doesn’t have credentials can manipulate [users] by using TikTok’s paid products,” says Pei, who is the chief growth officer at social media marketing agency AX10. “They can show their perspective to a large audience just by spending money.”
A representative for TikTok told Fortune that users cannot select specific keywords for their sponsored videos to appear alongside in searches (in other words, a user can’t pay to promote a video to appear specifically on searches for “Israel”). The paid-for videos are served up according to the logic of TikTok’s algorithm, just like any other video on the platform.
The TikTok spokesperson also said that all search results are moderated according to the company’s community guidelines, which prevent users from searching for violent, hateful or misleading content. She did note that the term “Israel Palestine” does not violate the guidelines.
Shortly after Fortune informed TikTok that it planned to publish an article around sponsored content on Israel-Palestine searches, however, the company removed sponsored content from searches for “Israel,” “Palestine,” and “Israel Palestine.” (After publication, a TikTok representative told Fortune that the company has now added Israel and Palestine to its evolving list of search terms that are not eligible for advertising. The representative also noted that TikTok has removed some of the sponsored videos from the site entirely).
Roughly eight years after Russia-linked trolls used ads on Facebook to foment division in the U.S. ahead of the presidential elections, the sponsored Israeli-Palestine content on TikTok shows how easy it remains to spread misleading information and to influence the public discourse on social media with a minimal budget.
And it comes at a time when a large portion of the public has become wary of the news media, as populist politicians and influencers urge their followers to “do their own research”—a practice that often translates to scrolling TikTok, X, Instagram and other platforms. The sponsored videos viewed by Fortune featured graphic images, strong biases, misleading information and deeply religious views.
The Middle East conflict has triggered a surge in social media misinformation
All social platforms have faced criticism for their propagation of mis- and disinformation, vitriolic and graphic content around war and other politicized issues.
On Tuesday EU industry chief Thierry Breton issued letters to X and Meta CEOs Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, respectively, urging the social platform leaders to curb disinformation and harmful content around Hamas and Israel-Palestine in compliance with EU laws. This happens as grassroots organizations call for Jewish and Israeli people to delete social media platforms to avoid seeing problematic and disturbing information that has proliferated these information hubs since Hamas’ first attack this month.
But buying influence on social to sway viewpoints on political issues has proven pernicious, and perhaps successful. Starting in 2015 Meta (then-Facebook) famously allowed Russian marketers to spend $100,000 on Facebook ads to influence the 2016 U.S. Presidential race with “divisive social and political messages,” said Facebook’s then-chief security officer Alex Stamos. Around the same time, political consulting group Cambridge Analytica harvested Facebook data to run highly targeted ads in favor of Donald Trump on Ted Cruz’s campaigns, resulting in the Federal Trade Commission fining Facebook $5 billion in 2019 for privacy violations.
Read more Fortune coverage of social media’s role in the conflict:
Though TikTok was not around in 2016, the ByteDance-owned platform has had its share of criticism for propagating problematic content. It has faced multiple lawsuits for surfacing suicide, self-harm and disturbing content to kids, leading to mental health consequences, per Bloomberg. A report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate cited by the New York Times found that TikTok starts recommending eating disorders and self-harm content to 13-year-olds within 30 minutes of their joining the platform.
The pay-to-promote feature used by users to spread Israel-Palestine content is separate from TikTok’s main advertising business, in which marketers pay TikTok to target videos based on granular audience criteria like past shopping behavior. The social media platform, owned by China’s privately-held ByteDance, generated roughly $10 billion in revenue last year, according to estimates.
But TikTok is investing heavily in new initiatives including ecommerce with the recent launch of TikTok Shop. According to a recent report from the Information, the company is on track to lose $500 million on its shopping investments this year.
