Osama Bin Laden’s ‘Letter To America’ Promoted By TikTok Influencers, Goes Viral

A videotape released by Al-Jazeera TV featuring Osama Bin Laden is broadcast in Britain December 27, 2001. The tape, estimated to have been recorded two weeks earlier, shows Bin Laden describing the World Trade Center attack as “commendable,” calling it “benevolent terrorism” designed to raise the issue of Israeli attacks on Palestinians. (Photo by Getty Images)

TikTok users are going viral for promoting Osama Bin Laden’s “Letter to America.”

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Lawmakers from both sides have blasted the China-owned app for promoting “terrorist propaganda.”

In the letter by the terrorist, bin Laden claimed that he orchestrated the horrific attacks on September 11th on the World Trade Center that killed close to 3,000 Americans because the United States “attacked us in Palestine.”

He also called the creation of Israel  a “crime which must be erased.” He also said the AIDS epidemic was “a Satanic American Invention” and criticized U.S. companies for allowing women to have jobs. 

The terrorist went on to say that Jews in the U.S. “control your policies, media and economy.”

As a result of the promotion TikTok was giving to the piece, The Guardian, which published the entire letter in 2002, took it off their website on Wednesday, claiming it was being “widely shared on social media without the full context.”

The trend seemed to be started by TikTok influencer Lynette Adkins, who has 12 million followers on social media. 

In her recent video, which received over 100,000 likes since being posted on Wednesday, she told her followers  to “stop what they’re doing right now and go read a letter to America.”

“The Guardian taking that post down is actually one of the worst things that they could’ve done. I don’t know who was behind it or what the reasoning was, but I feel like it literally just confirmed everything that we read in the letter,” Adkins said.

When reached for comment, a TikTok spokesperson said “content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism” and added that the company was “proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform.”

TikTok commented denying any wrongdoing in the situation. 

Additionally, The Guardian’s website now displays a message to readers explaining that the text had been removed. 

“This page previously displayed a document containing, in translation, the full text of Osama bin Laden’s ‘letter to the American people,’ as reported in the Observer on Sunday 24 November 2002. The document, which was published here on the same day, was removed on 15 November 2023,” the message said.

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