This document is the letter that the terrorist Osama Bin Laden sent to the Americans to claim and justify the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The “Letter to America” was published in 2002 on the website of the Guardian and it therefore remained available, buried in the nebula of digital data. It resurfaced on a TikTok network account, where a young influencer simply repeats the words of the leader of Al-Qaeda, thus repeating that the Americans are “servants of the Jewish people” and that the Palestinian people deserved to be “revenged”.
The video immediately went viral as it was viewed 14 million times in three days. It is welcomed as a revelation by many Americans, who take no distance from the author of the letter, like this Internet user for whom, through this letter, “realized that 9/11 and other attacks on Americans were simply the result of our government’s actions against other nations.” On November 15, three days after the first video, the Guardian removes from its site the link where one could consult, without any context, the propaganda of the leader of Al-Qaeda and TikTok removes the hashtag “Letter to America”, but it is already too late.
America is torn apart over the conflict between Israel and Hamas
Part of the American people trust the American political class, the media actors, who are mostly on the same line as the White House, in its involvement alongside the Israeli army. But Generation Z has been demonstrating for several weeks in universities, in front of institutions, demanding a ceasefire and denouncing the strikes against civilians in Gaza. This letter crystallizes an already violent debate within American society as the FBI was recently alarmed by the historic level reached by anti-Semitic acts, while noting an increase in Islamophobic attacks.
The reappearance of this letter from Bin Laden also raises many questions about the dissemination of this type of content and the damage caused by the power of social networks. The Chinese TikTok is obviously being singled out today in the United States since it took three days to act.
However, the Washington Post deciphered the cascading effect caused by the exhumation of the letter. The first lesson is that it was the TikTokers’ comments that were widely shared, more than the letter. The second lesson is that the deletion of the letter on the website of the Guardian accelerated its spread, since its ban aroused even more public curiosity.