Sada Social Center expresses its deep concern and strong condemnation regarding TikTok’s appointment of Erica Mindel—a former instructor in the Israeli army’s Armored Corps—as the platform’s new Manager of Hate Speech Policy.
According to reports reviewed by Sada Social, Mindel previously worked with the U.S. State Department under Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the Biden Administration’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. Prior to that, she served as an instructor in the Israeli army’s Spokesperson’s Unit. In her new role, Mindel will be tasked with formulating TikTok’s hate speech policies, shaping relevant legislative and regulatory frameworks, and monitoring trends—particularly those related to antisemitic content.
Sada Social views this appointment as a highly concerning indicator for the future of digital freedoms for Palestinians. The center warns of the serious implications that Mindel’s military background may have on TikTok’s moderation practices, especially regarding Palestinian reports of incitement, bias, and the silencing of their narrative. Assigning someone affiliated with an army currently under international investigation for genocide in Gaza to lead hate speech policy only entrenches existing biases and undermines the principles of fairness and digital justice.
Sada Social’s 2024 Digital Index revealed that 27% of all digital violations targeting Palestinian content occurred on TikTok. According to TikTok’s own transparency report for the second half of 2024, the platform complied with 94% of the Israeli government’s content removal requests, all while imposing strict censorship on Palestinian content. This included the deletion of videos with clear journalistic value, and the targeting of accounts belonging to journalists, media outlets, activists, and supporters of the Palestinian cause.
Sada Social also underscores that TikTok has failed to undertake any meaningful internal review of its policies, even after the South African government submitted video evidence to the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—footage that was published on TikTok and depicted Israeli soldiers celebrating the destruction of Palestinian homes, mocking victims, and writing messages on bombs before they were dropped on Gaza. Instead of responding to these disturbing violations, TikTok has continued its partnerships with a political and military regime currently under international investigation.
No more so than any other social media app, and as someone who lived in America at the time, China having my data was far less threatening than America having my data.
Tiktok duplicated their server infrastructure just for America so no American data would leave the country.
See the thing about boosting what the state department wanted boosted and censoring what they told them to censo. Tiktok isn’t Chinese propaganda, it’s American propaganda.
The CPC’s tendency to favor the working class over capital suggests otherwise; they’ve raised a billion people out of poverty, while India is a net exporter of food but still has children dying of hunger-related diseases. When a baby formula factory in China killed or sickened a dozen babies due to greed and gross negligence, they took the executives out back and shot them, and opened the market up to foreign imports. When the same thing happened in the US, nobody went to jail and the US didn’t even approve EU imports of formula because that would hurt the profits of the company that had just murdered literal babies.
I would never call China a utopia, but you have to actually understand a thing if you want to make meaningful criticisms of it.