The ‘original sounds’ of terrorist leaders: A TikTok feature enables terrorist content to flourish

Ahead of June anniversary of the Islamic State’s (IS) founding of its ‘caliphate,’ ISD undertook an analysis to understand how much of the group’s audio content, including from past and current leadership, was easily found on TikTok.

The findings suggest not only are the speeches of the leaders of the group easily found on the platform, but similarly al-Qaeda’s past leadership is easily found through simple searches of their names. Furthermore, even when the original content linked to these ideologues is taken down, TikTok’s ‘original sound’ feature allows the audio to live on the platform through other users’ content. The result was hundreds of videos, all using the ‘original sounds’ of terrorist ideologues proliferating on the platform.

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