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      Tech CEOs Got Grilled, but New Rules Are Still a Question

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      Tech leaders faced a grilling in the Senate, and one offered an apology. But skeptics fear little will change this time.Five tech C.E.O.s faced a grilling yesterday, but it’s unclear whether new laws to impose more safeguards for online children’s safety will pass.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesA lot of heat, but will there be regulation?Five technology C.E.O.s endured hours of grilling by senators on both sides of the aisle about their apparent failures to make their platforms safer for children, with some lawmakers accusing them of having “blood” on their hands.But for all of the drama, including Mark Zuckerberg of Meta apologizing to relatives of online child sex abuse victims, few observers believe that there’s much chance of concrete action.“Your product is killing people,” Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, flatly told Zuckerberg at Wednesday’s hearing. Over 3.5 hours, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee laid into the Meta chief and the heads of Discord, Snap, TikTok and X over their policies. (Before the hearing began, senators released internal Meta documents that showed that executives had rejected efforts to devote more resources to safeguard children.)But tech C.E.O.s offered only qualified support for legislative efforts. Those include the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, which would require tech platforms to take “reasonable measures” to prevent harm, and STOP CSAM and EARN IT, two bills that would curtail some of the liability shield given to those companies by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.Both Evan Spiegel of Snap and Linda Yaccarino of X backed KOSA, and Yaccarino also became the first tech C.E.O. to back the STOP CSAM Act. But neither endorsed EARN IT.Zuckerberg called for legislation to force Apple and Google — neither of which was asked to testify — to be held responsible for verifying app users’ ages. But he otherwise emphasized that Meta had already offered resources to keep children safe.Shou Chew of TikTok noted only that his company expected to invest over $2 billion in trust and safety measures this year.Jason Citron of Discord allowed that Section 230 “needs to be updated,” and his company later said that it supports “elements” of STOP CSAM.Experts worry that we’ve seen this play out before. Tech companies have zealously sought to defend Section 230, which protects them from liability for content users post on their platforms. Some lawmakers say altering it would be crucial to holding online platforms to account.Meanwhile, tech groups have fought efforts by states to tighten the use of their services by children. Such laws would lead to a patchwork of regulations that should instead be addressed by Congress, the industry has argued.Congress has failed to move meaningfully on such legislation. Absent a sea change in congressional will, Wednesday’s drama may have been just that.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Universal Music Group Threatens to Remove Music From TikTok

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      The company has been renegotiating its contract to license music with the social media site, which expires Wednesday.Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music company, said it would revoke the licenses for its vast catalog of songs from TikTok on Wednesday if the companies could not reach a new deal targeting artist compensation, artificial intelligence and other issues.In an open letter posted late Tuesday, Universal accused TikTok of responding to the company with “indifference, and then with intimidation,” creating a public squabble between the companies in the remaining hours of their existing contract. If the talks fail, TikTok users will be left without some of their favorite songs, including those by Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Alicia Keys and others.TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, is indisputably one of the fastest growing and most popular social media platforms, with more than a billion users. The company says that includes about 150 million Americans. For a majority of TikTok users, music is an integral part of the experience, as it plays over the short clips that fill users’ feeds.TikTok’s current license for using music from Universal’s catalog expires on Wednesday, and in negotiating its renewal, Universal said it asked TikTok to address three specific issues, including artist compensation. Universal said TikTok had proposed paying Universal’s artists and songwriters a fraction of the rate that similar social media platforms pay. Universal accused TikTok of trying to build a music-based business “without paying fair value for the music.”Universal said that as negations continued, TikTok tried to “bully” the company into accepting a deal worth less than their previous deal, claiming it was far less than fair market value.As of Wednesday morning, it was unclear if talks between Universal and TikTok were ongoing or if they had broken down. Universal did not immediately respond to a request for further comment, and a spokeswoman for TikTok said the company had nothing to add beyond a statement shared on social media, in which it accused Universal of putting “their own greed above the interests” of their artists and songwriters.“Despite Universal’s false narrative and rhetoric, the fact is they have chosen to walk away from the powerful support of a platform with well over a billion users that serves as a free promotional and discovery vehicle for their talent,” TikTok said in its statement. More

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      What Is the ‘Mob Wife Aesthetic’? TikTok’s Newest Trend Inspired by ‘The Sopranos.’

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      A TikTok trend that’s about more than French manicures and furs, the look focuses on conspicuous signifiers of wealth earned outside the rule of law.It’s not every day that Francis Ford Coppola deigns to weigh in on a TikTok trend.But he made an exception for the so-called mob wife aesthetic — a louche amalgamation of fur coats, leather and leopard prints that are being presented on the platform as a kind of mafiosa cosplay.In a recent Instagram post, Mr. Coppola, the director of “The Godfather,” compared the style to that of Connie Corleone, a character from the film portrayed by his sister, Talia Shire: “a sultry, delightful Italian princess.”Hundreds of videos on the app show young women with no apparent marital relationship to organized crime trying on their own approximations of the look, which usually involve heavy jewelry and heavier eyeliner.TikTok churns out a new reigning “aesthetic” every few months, and they vary widely in their real-world influence on offscreen dress. So what is actually powering this newly popular glamorization of outlaw-adjacent women?

      @thesweetpaisana How to dress like a mob wife (in the style of how to dress like you’re from the lower east side) yes this is satire (kind of) use this sound to show me your mob wife style! #mobwife #mobwives #italiangirl #italianamerican #italianamericansbelike #fashiontiktok #mobwifewinter #fyp ♬ Mob Wife Energy Activate – The Sweet Paisana What is the ‘mob wife aesthetic’?The most basic version involves throwing a fur coat — real or faux — over an all-black outfit. But according to its proponents, the look is nothing without the attitude to go with it. Careful students of the mob wife oeuvre add red nails and lipstick, a high-volume hairdo and sunglasses big enough to function as a kind of windshield.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Trump Cacophony Hits Different This Time

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      When was the last time you listened to Donald Trump speak at length? There’s a qualitative way to think about this question, about the substance of what he’s saying: He is still talking — perhaps more than people realize — about how the last election was stolen from him, and he treats the 2020 election as a Year Zero event that has ruined the world.But there’s a second — quantitative — way of looking at this question.In 2015 and 2016, as he was becoming the Republican nominee the first time, Mr. Trump quickly transformed into an all-encompassing, central figure, in an evolving, building story that started like a dark joke that Mr. Trump was in on, then swooned into a reality. Around this time eight years ago, terrorist mass shootings took place in Paris and California as the race for the Republican nomination became increasingly dark. It seemed to click into place then that Mr. Trump’s fluid plans, reactionary ideas, jokes and lies could coexist with and shape grave events. The combined effect of all this was to concentrate the country’s attention like a supernova; reaction to Mr. Trump became a constant feature of politics and also people’s personal lives.But the path toward his likely renomination feels relatively muted, as if the country were wandering through a mist, only to find ourselves back where we started, except older and wearier, and the candidates the same. “The street still hopes for somebody else,” one Trump-critical donor recently said of Wall Street donors, a kind of dreamy summary of where things stand. Sarah Longwell, who’s overseen regular focus groups, noted on her podcast this fall that many voters seem not to have clocked that Mr. Trump and President Biden are likely to be the nominees. “People are constantly telling me, ‘But couldn’t this happen? But couldn’t this happen?’” If Mr. Trump were to win the first two contests by large enough margins, the general election could essentially begin as early as next month.Why does the volume around Mr. Trump feel different? For one thing, he has opted out of two old ways he achieved omnipresence, no longer tweeting and no longer appearing at Republican debates. Eight years in, there is also a lack of suspense about whether Mr. Trump could become the Republican nominee or the president.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      TikTok’s Influence on Young Voters Is No Simple Matter

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      We’re in a season of hand-wringing and scapegoating over social media, especially TikTok, with many Americans and politicians missing that two things can be true at once: Social media can have an outsized and sometimes pernicious influence on society, and lawmakers can unfairly use it as an excuse to deflect legitimate criticisms.Young people are overwhelmingly unhappy about U.S. policy on the war in Gaza? Must be because they get their “perspective on the world on TikTok” — at least according to Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat who holds a strong pro-Israel stance. This attitude is shared across the aisle. “It would not be surprising that the Chinese-owned TikTok is pushing pro-Hamas content,” Senator Marsha Blackburn said. Another Republican senator, Josh Hawley, called TikTok a “purveyor of virulent antisemitic lies.”Consumers are unhappy with the economy? Surely, that’s TikTok again, with some experts arguing that dismal consumer sentiment is a mere “vibecession” — feelings fueled by negativity on social media rather than by the actual effects of inflation, housing costs and more. Some blame online phenomena such as the viral TikTok “Silent Depression” videos that compare the economy today to that of the 1930s — falsely asserting things were easier then.It’s no secret that social media can spread misleading and even harmful content, given that its business model depends on increasing engagement, thus often amplifying inflammatory content (which is highly engaging!) with little to no guardrails for veracity. And, yes, TikTok, whose parent company is headquartered in Beijing and which is increasingly dominating global information flows, should generate additional concern. As far back as 2012, research published in Nature by Facebook scientists showed how companies can easily and stealthily alter real-life behavior, such as election turnout.But that doesn’t make social media automatically and solely culpable for whenever people hold opinions inconvenient to those in power. While comparisons with the horrors of the Great Depression can fall far off the mark, young people do face huge economic challenges now, and that’s their truth even if their grasp of what happened a century ago is off. Housing prices and mortgage rates are high and rents less affordable, resurgent inflation has outpaced wages until recently, groceries have become much more expensive and career paths are much less certain.Similarly, given credible estimates of heavy casualties inflicted among Gazans — about 40 percent of whom are children — by Israel’s monthslong bombing campaign, maybe a more engaged younger population is justifiably critical of President Biden’s support of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government? Even the Israeli military’s own estimates say thousands civilians have been killed, and there is a lot of harrowing video out of Gaza showing entire families wiped out. At the same time, the Committee to Protect Journalists reports that at least 69 journalists and media workers have been among those killed in the war; Israel blocks access to foreign journalists outside of a few embedded ones under its control. (Egypt does as well.) In such moments, social media can act as a bypass around censorship and silence.There’s no question that there’s antisemitic content and lies on TikTok, and on other platforms. I’ve seen many outrageous clips about Hamas’s actions on Oct. 7 that falsely and callously deny the horrific murders and atrocities. And I do wish we knew more about exactly what people were seeing on TikTok: Without meaningful transparency, it’s hard to know the scale and scope of such content on the platform.But I’m quite skeptical that young people would be more upbeat about the economy and the war in Gaza if not for viral videos.Why don’t we know more about TikTok’s true influence, or that of YouTube or Facebook? Because that requires the kind of independent research that’s both expensive and possible only with the cooperation of the platforms themselves, which hold so much key data we don’t see about the spread and impact of such content. It’s as if tobacco companies privately compiled the nation’s lung cancer rates or car companies hoarded the air quality statistics.For example, there is a strong case that social media has been harmful to the well-being of teenagers, especially girls. The percentage of 12- to 17-year-old girls who had a major depressive episode had been flat until about 2011, when smartphones and social media became more common, and then more than doubled in the next decade. Pediatric mental health hospitalizations among girls are also sharply up since 2009. Global reading, math and science test scores, too, took a nosedive right around then.The multiplicity of such findings is strongly suggestive. But is it a historic shift that would happen anyway even without smartphones and social media? Or is social media the key cause? Despite some valiant researchers trying to untangle this, the claim remains contested partly because we lack enough of the right kind of research with access to data.And lack of more precise knowledge certainly impedes action. As things stand, big tech companies can object to calls for regulation by saying we don’t really know if social media is truly harmful in the ways claimed — a convenient shrug, since they helped ensure this outcome.Meanwhile, politicians alternate between using the tools to their benefit or rushing to blame them, but without passing meaningful legislation.Back in 2008 and 2012, Facebook and big data were credited with helping Barack Obama win his presidential races. After his 2012 re-election, I wrote an article calling for regulations requiring transparency and understanding and worried whether “these new methods are more effective in manipulating people.” I concluded with “you should be worried even if your candidate is — for the moment — better at these methods.” The Democrats, though, weren’t having any of that, then. The data director of Obama for America responded that concerns such as mine were “a bunch of malarkey.” No substantive regulations were passed.The attitude changed after 2016, when it felt as if many people wanted to talk only about social media. But social media has never been some magic wand that operates in a vacuum; its power is amplified when it strikes a chord with people’s own experiences and existing ideologies. Donald Trump’s narrow victory may have been surprising, but it wasn’t solely because of social media hoodwinking people.There were many existing political dynamics that social media played on and sometimes manipulated and exacerbated, including about race and immigration (which were openly talked about) and some others that had generated much grass-roots discontent but were long met with bipartisan incuriosity from the establishment, such as the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, America’s role in the world (including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) and how international trade had reshaped the economy.As we head into the 2024 elections, in some ways, little seems to have changed since Obama’s victory in 2008 — the first election dubbed the “Facebook Election.” We’re still discussing viral misinformation, fake news, election meddling, but there’s still no meaningful legislation that responds to the challenges brought about by the internet and social media and that seeks to bring transparency, oversight or accountability. Just add realistic A.I.-generated content, a new development, and the rise of TikTok, we’re good to go for 2024 — if Trump wins the Republican nomination as seems likely, only one candidate’s name needs updating from 2016.Do we need proper oversight and regulation of social media? You bet. Do we need to find more effective ways of countering harmful lies and hate speech? Of course. But I can only conclude that despite the heated bipartisan rhetoric of blame, scapegoating social media is more convenient to politicians than turning their shared anger into sensible legislation.Worrying about the influence of social media isn’t a mere moral panic or “kids these days” tsk-tsking. But until politicians and institutions dig into the influence of social media and try to figure out ways to regulate it, and also try addressing broader sources of discontent, blaming TikTok amounts to just noise.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Poll Finds Wide Disapproval of Biden on Gaza, and Little Room to Shift Gears

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      Voters broadly disapprove of the way President Biden is handling the bloody strife between Israelis and Palestinians, a New York Times/Siena College poll has found, with younger Americans far more critical than older voters of both Israel’s conduct and of the administration’s response to the war in Gaza.Voters are also sending decidedly mixed signals about the direction U.S. policy-making should take as the war in Gaza grinds into its third month, with Israelis still reeling from the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, thousands of Palestinian deaths in Gaza and the Biden administration trying to pressure Israel to scale back its military campaign. Nearly as many Americans want Israel to continue its military campaign as want it to stop now to avoid further civilian casualties.That split appears to leave the president with few politically palatable options.The findings of the Times/Siena poll hold portents not only for Mr. Biden as he enters the 2024 re-election year but also for long-term relations between the Jewish state and its most powerful benefactor, the United States.The fractured views on the conflict among traditionally Democratic voter groups show the continued difficulty Mr. Biden faces of holding together the coalition he built in 2020 — a challenge that is likely to persist even as economic indicators grow more positive and legal troubles swirl around his expected opponent, former President Donald J. Trump.Overall, registered voters say they favor Mr. Trump over Mr. Biden in next year’s presidential election by two percentage points, 46 percent to 44 percent. The president’s job approval rating has slid to 37 percent, down two points from July.But there is considerable uncertainty over whether disaffected voters will even vote. While it is still early, the race is flipped among the likely electorate, with Mr. Biden leading by two percentage points.Economic concerns remain paramount, with 34 percent of registered voters listing economic- or inflation-related concerns as the top issue facing the country. That’s down from 45 percent in October 2022, but still high. More

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      Political Debate Is Rife on TikTok. Politicians? Not So Much.

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      President Biden and the White House regularly post to millions of followers on social media, talking about the economy on Facebook, sharing Christmas decorations on YouTube, showcasing pardoned turkeys on Instagram, posting about infrastructure on the X platform. They’re even on Threads.But they aren’t speaking directly to 150 million Americans on TikTok. There’s no official @POTUS, White House or Biden-Harris 2024 account. You’ll find only one of the Republican presidential candidates there — and just 37 sitting Congress members, according to a New York Times review of accounts.Some pundits call next year the “TikTok election” because of the ballooning power and influence of the video app. TikTok may have been known for viral dances in 2020, but it has increasingly become a news source for millennials and Gen Z-ers, who will be a powerful part of the electorate. But less than a year from the election, most politicians are keeping their distance from the app, as efforts grow in Washington and elsewhere to restrict or ban it because of its ownership by the Chinese company ByteDance. Many lawmakers and regulators have expressed concern that TikTok could put users’ information into the hands of Beijing officials — an argument that the company disputes.By passing up a huge microphone because of those concerns, however, politicians are running the risk that they and their campaigns will not directly reach young people on the app. They might also be upstaged by savvy challengers who may not feel so conflicted and who can figure out how to use TikTok to their advantage.Many campaigns are trying to hedge their bets by turning to a growing network of TikTok political influencers to share their messages or by making short videos on YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels in hopes that they’ll end up trending on TikTok. They have to give up some control to do that, and they need to persuade creators to work with them, often for little to no pay.To many political consultants, the politicians’ absence on TikTok is perhaps untenable.“The discourse is being shaped by this thing even if you yourself don’t use it,” said Teddy Goff, a top digital strategist for President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist, said that he was telling candidates “if you didn’t get it banned in 2023, you need to get on in 2024.”Several Republican presidential candidates have slammed TikTok at their recent debates and criticized Vivek Ramaswamy, the one candidate who has joined the app despite previously referring to it as “digital fentanyl.” He has defended joining TikTok, saying he did it to reach young voters.Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign team said that it did not need its own TikTok accounts to reach voters.“The reality is us having an account would not make a substantial difference in what we need to do on TikTok,” said Rob Flaherty, Mr. Biden’s deputy campaign manager and the former White House director of digital strategy. “The most important thing you can do is work through influencers.”TikTok arrived as a political force during the 2022 midterm campaign, when Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, successfully roasted his opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz, in a flurry of cutting videos, and Representative Jeff Jackson, Democrat of North Carolina, used a video filter to make his head look like a piece of broccoli while talking about reaching younger audiences.Annie Wu Henry, a 27-year-old digital strategist who helped run Mr. Fetterman’s TikTok account in 2022, said his use showcased TikTok’s potential reach and influence. She said she was amazed as she watched clips and memes that Mr. Fetterman’s campaign posted on the app take off “and become actual parts of conversation or picked up by traditional media sources.”Annie Wu Henry helped run social media for John Fetterman’s Senate campaign last year.Michelle Gustafson for The New York TimesWeeks after the elections, though, Washington’s sentiment toward the company turned sour. The Biden administration, as well as most states, some cities and some college campuses, has barred the app from being used on official devices. Some lawmakers have called for a national ban.Today, just 7 percent of the 533 Senators and Representatives have verified accounts on TikTok, and some have never posted, according to the analysis by The Times. None are Republican. The few who have joined often post to the app from separate “TikTok phones” because of security concerns, said Mike Nellis, a Democratic digital strategist.Mr. Jackson is the most popular, with 2.5 million followers, and Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, comes in second, with 1.4 million. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota each have over 200,000 followers.Ms. Wu said campaigns, including Mr. Biden’s, were potentially leaving major audiences on the table.“It needs to be figured out, and there’s almost this rush right now of who’s going to do it,” she said.The White House has tapped into TikTok in the past few years by working with social media stars to promote access to Covid-19 vaccines and to brief viewers on the Russia-Ukraine war and the Inflation Reduction Act. Several stars told The Times they weren’t paid but were eager to participate.That sort of workaround is expected to be even more popular next year. “There’s this booming industry under the surface of both agencies and platforms that are helping political organizations, social impact groups and politicians themselves sponsor content on TikTok and partner with creators and influencers to put out messaging,” said Brian Derrick, a political strategist and co-founder of Oath, a platform for guiding donations to Democratic campaigns.TikTok prohibits paid political ads, including paying creators for endorsements. It doesn’t encourage politicians to join the platform, though it does verify official accounts.A White House spokesperson, when asked about the use of TikTok, pointed to a rule barring the app from being used on federal devices as of March and declined to comment further.Harry Sisson, a 21-year-old junior at New York University and a political commentator on TikTok, is a rising creator, sharing news and opinions against backdrops of social media posts and articles.Yuvraj Khanna for The New York TimesHarry Sisson, a 21-year-old junior at New York University and a political commentator on TikTok, started posting in 2020, when he was a high school senior, to help Mr. Biden’s campaign for president. He has amassed 700,000 followers.Mr. Sisson said that in the past year and a half, Democratic groups had offered him more opportunities, including filming voting videos with Mr. Obama and watching the State of the Union at the White House. He wasn’t paid but was thrilled to be involved.With the White House in particular, he said, “They’ve always stressed, we’re not here to tell you guys what to say, if you disagree with us, we’re not going to be upset.”Mr. Sisson said he earned money through views on his TikTok videos and accepted some paid collaborations with advocacy groups that he believed in like Planned Parenthood, but his goal was to help elect Democrats. A.B. Burns-Tucker, a political TikTok creator, believes that her content has influenced voters, pointing to the approval of a recent Ohio ballot measure that enshrined a right to abortion in the State Constitution.Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesA.B. Burns-Tucker, 34, is another political content creator who has joined White House briefings. She posts on TikTok as @iamlegallyhype, and has over 700,000 followers. She said her account took off after she made a popular explainer video about the Russia-Ukraine war, which colloquially referred to world leaders as “Big Daddy Biden” and “Big Bad P.” She says she’s now a news source for people who don’t tune in elsewhere.“I talk about current events with my friends all the time, but most of them are like, ‘Girl, I don’t watch the news, if you don’t tell me I don’t know,’” she said. “I took that and ran with it.”Ms. Burns-Tucker believes that she has influenced voters, pointing to the approval of a recent Ohio ballot measure that enshrined a right to abortion in the State Constitution. She was paid by Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights to make a TikTok video that urged people to vote for the ballot measure, which aligned with her personal beliefs, she said. “A lot of people in the comment section were like, I didn’t even know, I’ll be in line first thing tomorrow,” she added. The video passed 45,000 views.People like Mr. Sisson and Ms. Burns-Tucker don’t have a parallel among conservatives, said Amanda Carey Elliott, a digital consultant for Republicans.Ms. Elliott said that she was firmly against using TikTok based on the party’s stance on China — but that there was also less incentive for Republicans to use it.“There’s not a huge culture of TikTok influencers on the right — it’s just not the same for us,” she said.Still, some Republican consultants say the opportunity is too big to pass up. Mr. Wilson, the Republican strategist, has been trying to guide candidates on how to sign up for the app after criticizing it.“Candidates drive in cars all the time — that doesn’t mean they want cars to be unregulated,” he said. “There’s not necessarily a hypocrisy there if you’re clear about what your position is and how you’re using it.” More

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      Nikki Haley Renews Call for TikTok Ban After Bin Laden Letter Circulates

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      The presidential candidate has argued that social media platforms should better police certain users and content, prompting backlash from some Republican rivals.Nikki Haley ratcheted up her calls this week for the U.S. government to ban TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media platform, after some users, weighing in on the war between Israel and Hamas, promoted “Letter to America,” a text written by Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.Ms. Haley, a Republican presidential contender and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President Donald J. Trump, argued that the document was another example of foreign adversaries using social media to spread anti-American propaganda to young people.“That’s why you have to ban TikTok,” Ms. Haley said at a town hall in Newton, Iowa, on Friday. “Nepal just came out yesterday, and they’re banning it because they see what’s happening in their country. India did it. Why are we the last ones to do it?”In bin Laden’s letter, the mastermind of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which killed nearly 3,000 people, defended the terrorists’ actions. He wrote that American taxpayers had been complicit in harming Muslims in the Middle East, including destroying Palestinian homes. He also said that Americans were “servants” to Jews, who controlled the country’s economy and media. Bin Laden was killed by U.S. military and intelligence operatives in 2011.In a statement on X, TikTok responded to Ms. Haley’s calls for a ban — which she also posted on social media Thursday — by saying that the circulation of bin Laden’s letter violated the platform’s rules banning support for terrorism and that it was policing related content accordingly.“We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform,” the company said. “The number of videos on TikTok is small and reports of it trending on our platform are inaccurate.”A spokesman for the company told The New York Times on Thursday that most of the views of the videos came after news organizations wrote about them, and that the letter had also “appeared across multiple platforms and the media.”Ms. Haley’s crusade against TikTok has become a flashpoint in the Republican presidential race, coinciding with her rise in the polls. Mr. Trump, her former boss, continues to be the overwhelming front-runner, but Ms. Haley, a former South Carolina governor, is trying to overtake Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for second place.At the Republican debate last week in Miami, she clashed with Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur, over calls for a TikTok ban. He mentioned that her daughter had an account on the platform, drawing Ms. Haley’s ire and leading her to call Mr. Ramaswamy “scum.”Ms. Haley has knocked Mr. Ramaswamy for joining TikTok after he had previously referred to the app as “digital fentanyl.” In the days following the debate, she has contended that social media platforms should better police certain users and content, prompting criticism from some of her rivals. Her call on Tuesday for social media companies to verify the identity of users and to bar people from posting anonymously was panned by Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Ramaswamy and others as unconstitutional and a threat to free speech.“You know who were anonymous writers back in the day?” Mr. DeSantis wrote on X. “Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison when they wrote the Federalist Papers.”Ms. Haley told CNBC a day later that her comments were directed at foreign adversaries, not Americans.At town halls for her campaign in Iowa on Thursday and Friday, Ms. Haley continued to press on TikTok and brought up the letter by bin Laden.“Now you have members of our younger generation, they’re saying now they understand why he did it. That’s disgusting,” she said at a town hall in Newton on Friday. “That’s not America doing that. That’s China doing that.”Ms. Haley has assailed what she calls “foreign infiltration” into American society by hostile governments. She has particularly focused on propaganda and disinformation, which she says is being distributed by China, Russia and Iran to young Americans through TikTok and other social media platforms. She has also argued that young Americans are more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause because of “pro-Hamas videos on TikTok.”She has also hammered the rise of Chinese investment in communities across the country, particularly the acquisition of farmland and agricultural technology — an acute anxiety in rural states like Iowa.Linda Schroeder, of Dubuque, said Ms. Haley’s focus on the issue is what put the candidate over the top as her choice.“Why are we allowing it? For them to be here,” Ms. Schroeder said after hearing from Ms. Haley. “I grew up with 14 other siblings on a farm, and we still have the farm, and we’ll keep it.” More