Haley cites viral bin Laden letter in call for social media reform

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) cited a decades-old letter from Osama bin Laden that recently went viral in a call for social media reform Thursday.

“[W]hen you look at social media, I have long said that we have to ban TikTok,” Haley, a 2024 GOP presidential primary candidate, said on Fox News Radio’s “The Guy Benson Show.” “And if you didn’t know why, there’s another example today.”

“They are posting letters of Osama bin Laden’s letter, the week after the 9/11 attack, and it is the justification for why he did it,” Haley continued. “And so you have a lot of our kids sitting there siding with that, that ‘Oh, America deserved it at that time.’”

Bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America,” which was published nearly a year after the Sept. 11 attacks, has recently made the rounds online. The letter attempted to justify the killing and targeting of American civilians.

Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011 by U.S. Special Forces.

Many videos showed support for the al-Qaeda leader’s argument and suggested to others that they read the letter following the U.S.’s backing of Israel in its war against Palestinian militant group Hamas.

“Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism,” TikTok Policy posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform.”

The number of videos praising bin Laden’s argument is not large, TikTok said, despite some reportedly garnering hundreds of thousands of views and likes.

“This is not unique to TikTok and has appeared across multiple platforms and the media,” the post said.

Haley and fellow 2024 GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy got into an argument during last week’s Republican presidential debate, in which Ramaswamy said Haley’s daughter was using the platform “for a long time.”

“Leave my daughter out of your voice,” Haley said. “You’re just scum.”