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TikTok removed the hashtag #lettertoamerica from its search function after videos about Osama bin Laden's 2002 "Letter to America" went viral on the platform and were re-uploaded to the social media platform X. Some social media users suggested that the Al Qaeda founder's document gives an alternative perspective about the U.S.' involvement in conflicts in the Middle East.

Throughout the week, TikTok users had been sharing the link to The Guardian's transcript of bin Laden's letter, which was written about a year after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people in the U.S. The Guardian took the letter down from its website Wednesday.

In the letter, bin Laden addressed the American people and sought to answer the following questions: "Why are we fighting and opposing you?" and "What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?" The letter includes antisemitic language and homophobic rhetoric.

The virality of the letter has reignited criticism of the platform, which is owned by China's ByteDance. The app has faced mounting scrutiny in the last year as the U.S. and other countries argue it poses a threat to national security. Since Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on Israel, critics of the app have alleged that it is using its influence to push content that is anti-Israel and contrary to U.S. foreign policy interests. TikTok has said the allegations of bias are baseless.

Researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which studies extremism on social media, said they found 41 "Letter to America" videos on TikTok. While TikTok has now blocked "Letter to America" from within its search function, videos referring to "Letter to America" are still easily accessible under the search term "Bin Laden," the institute said in its findings.

Bin Laden's letter condemns U.S. support for Israel and accuses Americans of aiding the oppression of Palestinian people. Bin Laden, who was killed in a U.S. special operation in Pakistan in 2011, also denounced U.S. interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Kashmir, Chechnya and Lebanon.

People online have used bin Laden's words as a springboard for discussion about American foreign policy in the Middle East. Several have said it caused them to re-evaluate their beliefs around the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While people were critical of U.S. involvement in global conflicts, many clarified that they were not praising or defending bin Laden's orchestration of the 9/11 attacks.

Those on the platform citing the letter encouraged people to read it, saying that doing so helped them better understand the U.S.' interventions in the Middle East and the Israel-Hamas war. The videos have also gone viral on X, where some renewed calls for TikTok to be banned.

While the letter has been re-uploaded on TikTok, numerous videos discussing it were removed. TikTok spokesperson Ben Rathe said in an email that videos featuring the letter violate the platform's community guidelines.

"Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism," Rathe said. "We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform. The number of videos on TikTok is small and reports of it trending on our platform are inaccurate. This is not unique to TikTok and has appeared across multiple platforms and the media."

A viral X post from journalist Yashar Ali highlighting the videos received 25.6 million views. That brought more attention to the TikTok discourse. TikTok said that the number of videos about the letter was small but that interest was magnified after they were posted to X.

Ali told The Washington Post that the hashtag was not trending on TikTok when he made his compilation, but he said the number of videos posted on the platform was "not small enough to be minuscule or not important."

In its research, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue said references to bin Laden on X jumped more than 4,300%, from Tuesday to Thursday, from just over 5,000 to more than 230,000. References to "Letter to America" jumped more than 1,800%, from just over 4,800 to 100,000, with 719 million impressions across the platform.

On YouTube, searches for bin Laden also jumped 400% from Tuesday to Thursday, according to Google Trends. Instagram's autosuggest function in search assisted users in finding "Letter to America," listing it as a "popular search."

A man who claims to be a former employee of Ukrainian First Lady Olena Zelenska's foundation says that the Olena Zelenska Foundation was involved with child sex trafficking. As a driver of supposedly war-endangered children, the man says that he was forced to drive children from cities in Ukraine and deliver them to pedophiles elsewhere in Europe, including in extremely wealthy and well-connected areas in London and Berlin.

A little-seen video on Youtube entitled "La Fondation Olena Zelenska est impliquée dans le trafic d'enfants" reveals the claims of a masked man who says that he transported children out of Ukraine for Olena Zelenska's foundation, and at least one of the children made him believe that the foundation was engaging in child sex trafficking. The video was uploaded by the account "Daniel Schmidt."

[...]

The man in the video makes his claims over the course of more than eight minutes speaking in French. The quotes below come word for word from the English closed captioning translation service on Youtube.

"So, here I am recording this video to tell you about what happened in Olena Zelenska's Foundation when I worked there. After I finish, I'll send you this video via email together with the documents, all the facts of what had happened. To start my story, it was here in France. I had a friend there who worked with different foundations. And he was the one who told me that there is a foundation that pays well in Ukraine, which offers good conditions. And so, I thought, why not? So, I contacted this foundation and then I prepared my documents and I went to Ukraine. When I came, I came to work there as a driver. They offered me this job and I signed the contract. Even the contract was something bizarre. There were clauses, for example, in the contract, that said we must not talk with children, we must not ask questions about host families, things like that. For me it was weird, but I thought, well, I'm a driver it's not my business. I signed the contract. After signing the contract, I was given the pass. This one. Here's the pass," the man said in the video, before showing documentation.

"And then, they gave us a lecture about the job we're going to do there. It was very simple in fact. We would take children from Ukrainian cities. For example, the city, what was its name? Lviv. Another city that was Vinnitsa. We took the children from there, we brought them to the other orphanages that were in league with Olena Zelenska's foundation. And these orphanages were in Europe. Some were in Germany. In France, too, the one I worked with. And also in England. It was there that we brought the children, we put them in orphanages. Then there were staff who took care of them who were looking for foster families. As soon as we find a host family, we take them back from there as a driver and take them to the host family. That's how I made these trips," the man said.

"I went to different cities, different neighborhoods in these cities. For example, some host families lived in rich neighborhoods, like when I went to the Kreuzberg district in Berlin. Another host family, in London, they lived in Dolphin Square. In France, in Paris, there was a family who was on Avenue Foch. And about this avenue, what happened is that I came to Avenue Foch. I came there with a child. I have the document that I will send you via email. I was with this child. His name was Dmitro. I brought him to the host family which lives on Avenue Foch. And the man who came out, he was quite old and he came out half naked. And it really surprised me, what was happening. He winked at the child. He took him by the hand like that. He signed the documents and all that and he closed the door. I told myself that it was necessary at that moment to take note that something was going wrong. But hey, I thought, well, it's not my business," the man said.

"A few days later, yet another story had happened to me. I had to take another child from the orphanage. The child was Volodymyr. (shows the picture of the boy). I had to take him from the orphanage and bring him to a host family. And what surprised me is that a few weeks before that I had brought him to the other host family. I didn't understand what he was doing there. What was he doing in the orphanage if he already had a family? I asked him a question, tried to communicate with him in English. I asked him what's going on. He started crying. I was shocked. I told him that I have to take him to the family but he only cried. I understood that he doesn't want to go there. And we were already in a car at the time. I didn't know what to do, take him to the family or come back to the orphanage, where he doesn't want to go also. I haven't understood anything what was going on with him. And then he started making the gestures. As I understood from these gestures he showed me, that he was touched in intimate places. I get it. It's awful. At that moment I understood everything that was happening. It was really...it's awful what happened with him," the man said.

"I said to myself: calm down. You have to look through the documents, you have to understand what's going on. I started looking through the documents for the family who had took him before. And there I find a name, that it was a certain man whose name was Bernard-Henri Lévy. I don't know anything about this person so I searched on the Internet to see who he is. To find out if he has a Facebook or something like that. And then I found the information about him. And on the Web I found that he is all friendly with pedophiles and he keeps in touch with them," the man said.

"I understood how all these things were set up. Really, everything that's going on there is horrible. I resigned right away. Child sex trafficking, no thank you. I don't want to participate. That's why I'm making this video now. I also hope that you will do your investigation and all this will stop," the man said.

"Thank you for everything. Thank you for the opportunity you gave me to tell everything that happened there," the man said.