Bin Laden’s letter did not gain much attention on TikTok until Monday, November 13, when another TikTok user posted a video urging people to go and read the letter. Again, this video, from an account with 12,800 followers, did not read specific lines from the letter, but showed the poster apparently in shock upon discovering the letter’s contents.
This video gained a lot more attention, racking up over 210,000 views before it was taken down on Thursday. Numerous other accounts tagged or referenced this video in their own “Letter to America” videos in the following days.
The account holder, who didn’t respond to a question from WIRED asking where she first heard about the letter, posted a follow-up video on Wednesday, November 15, explaining that she had heard about the bin Laden video over the weekend but didn’t have time to post about it until Monday, November 13, though she failed to say where she had seen it referenced.
Then, on Wednesday, The Guardian removed an English translation of bin Laden’s letter from its website. The publication said they first noticed an uptick in traffic to the site on Thursday, November 9, but didn’t remove the letter until Wednesday, after videos about it were shared to TikTok.
“The transcript published on our website had been widely shared on social media without the full context,” a note on the website reads. “Therefore we decided to take it down and direct readers instead to the news article that originally contextualized it.”
After The Guardian removed the letter, some accounts, including those on X, began sharing a link to a page on the website of the US Director of National Intelligence, which hosts a different letter written by bin Laden in 2008.
The removal of the letter sparked a flurry of new videos on TikTok criticizing The Guardian’s decision and claiming it was somehow evidence that bin Laden’s message was being censored, even though the letter is freely available elsewhere online.
The same day, journalist Yashar Ali shared a compilation of the TikTok videos on X, with the comment: “Many of them say that reading the letter has opened their eyes, and they’ll never see geopolitical matters the same way again.” As of Friday morning, that video on X has been viewed 37 million times.
