Why Al Qaeda’s Letter Went Viral on TikTok

For several days last week, U.S. media was saturated with stories about how al Qaeda’s 2002 “Letter to the American People” had apparently gone viral on TikTok and other social media platforms. According to these early reports, amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, videos of TikTok users reading portions of the terrorist group’s manifesto and characterizing Osama bin Laden, commonly credited as the letter’s author, as a hero fighting Western-led oppression were finding receptive viewers among some Gen Z users.

First circulated online about a year after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the al Qaeda letter is a nearly 4,000-word, deeply antisemitic screed that aims to justify the 9/11 attacks as part of a righteous holy war and includes a laundry list of grievances against the West, from supporting Israel to permitting usury, drugs, and general “acts of immorality” to creating AIDS. The videos that were trending on social media focused on just a small portion of the letter in which the group condemns the United States for helping to establish and support a Jewish state in the Palestinian territories, calling it “one of the greatest crimes.”

Despite the letter having been available on the Guardian website since November 2002—as well as in academic texts easily found in most university libraries—21 years later, Gen Z social media users were evidently seeing the al Qaeda letter with fresh eyes and through the lens of the Biden administration’s staunch support for Israel in the war in Gaza, a position unpopular with many young Democratic voters.

Or so the initial media coverage made it seem. In reality, although a couple hundred of these TikTok videos did exist, their reach and popularity in the vast TikTok ecosystem was extremely limited. They only achieved true virality after a prominent U.S. journalist with a substantial following on X (formerly Twitter) posted about the trend, prompting outrage and sparking widespread media coverage. Interest spiked again after the Guardian took the letter down from its site, inviting cries of government censorship and fueling conspiracy theories. What began as a minor blip on a social media platform that boasts a staggering 150 million active users in the United States alone had become a full-fledged moral panic, with even the White House weighing in to denounce the apparent trend.

Even though the popularity of these videos was vastly overblown, it’s worth exploring why they exist at all. For many Gen Z Americans, who were born in or after the mid- to late-1990s, bin Laden is a distant figure, resigned to the past. Al Qaeda’s late-1990s attacks in East Africa and Yemen and post-9/11 plots in London and Madrid are largely unknown or overlooked. As for 9/11 itself, the attacks have become an internet meme for some young people who are too far removed from the events to truly understand the implications of that fateful day.

This apathy towards al Qaeda and disinterest in the way the group’s attacks shaped global agendas for over two decades is rooted not in an affinity for the aims of terrorists, but rather in a detachment from events that took place before many in this generation were even born. This distance and lack of lived experience has allowed for the revisionism of events to find resonance with some members of a generation that spends much of its time online and is deeply skeptical of mainstream news narratives.

Equally, the letter’s messages do not highlight many of the hateful and violent ideologies that fueled al Qaeda. Instead, a surface-level reading of the text implies that bin Laden and his organization were decolonial voices of the subaltern, fighting against Western capitalist hegemony in the Middle East. The ideas al Qaeda draws upon will resonate with young people who have not studied the group’s doctrine more deeply. The Islamic State, which began as an offshoot of al Qaeda, shares much of the same ideology, yet it finds less support among Gen Z, largely due to that generation’s own lived experiences both of Islamic State attacks in the West and online visuals of horrific executions carried out by the terrorist group in the Middle East.

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Many Gen Z Americans are also dubious of—if not outright immune to—the reflexive patriotism and nationalist sentiment that the 9/11 attacks catalyzed in the United States and much of the West. The legacy of the disastrous 2003 war in Iraq, which in truth had nothing to do with al Qaeda or the 9/11 attacks but was sold at the time to U.S. and Western publics as a righteous response to those atrocities, has contributed to this perception.

Recently, a popular narrative has also been circulating online that frames the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks against Israel as the messy reality of what “decolonization”—as some on the left have characterized the struggle for Palestinian rights—requires and mocks those who believed such efforts could be accomplished solely with “essays” and “vibes.” This helps explain how the cherry-picked writings of a murderous terrorist organization such as al Qaeda might be reframed in some corners of online discourse as words of legitimate resistance. Some online are also under the false assumption that bin Laden grew up poor and personally suffered from occupation. However, both bin Laden and his deputy and eventual successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, came from wealthy, elite families in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, respectively.

The fact that some young people see a common cause between themselves and jihadist groups such as al Qaeda indicates a dangerously narrow understanding of international politics and world history. The starting point is the idea that the West has a monopoly on oppression and problematic behavior, thereby removing the responsibility and agency of any non-Western actors. Any group or figure can therefore be painted as somehow benevolent, waging the good fight, simply by virtue of being non-Western. Ironically, groups such as al Qaeda are essentially the far-right equivalent in their own respective parts of the world: fascists who manipulate religion and identity to suppress the rights of women, sectarianism, and the LGBTQ+ community.

Interestingly, it appears the “Letter to the American People” may have been written not by bin Laden but by Zawahiri. Within jihadist circles, the letter’s true authorship has been subject to debate, but the fact that it featured in a 2007 series of Zawahiri’s writings titled “Message to the West: Why Do We Fight You? And What Do We Want From You?” implies that he may have been the original author. These important nuances are likely to be lost on those who seek to use social media to convey bite-size bits of information. The authorship confusion also reflects a misguided notion that everything associated with al Qaeda can be attributed to bin Laden.

Another nuance overlooked by the TikTokers who promoted selected segments of the letter is that, in the 1980s, bin Laden and Zawahiri in fact broke with Palestinian ideologue Abdullah Azzam, who, after the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan, was insisting on bringing global jihad to Palestine next. Indeed, Palestine was never one of al Qaeda’s top priorities; rather, just as many Middle Eastern autocrats have done for years, the group consciously included Palestine in its rhetoric, capitalizing on Arab publics’ sympathies for that cause to gain support and widen al Qaeda’s appeal.

It is unlikely any of the TikTokers discussing this letter have any awareness of this context, which speaks to a wider issue of social media platforms enabling and amplifying the spread of often-dangerous ideas by poorly informed users. This process creates a microcosm in which people can share all kinds of disturbing opinions and feel supported and validated by a plethora of other users.

Young Americans are expressing record-high levels of dissatisfaction with the way Israel is responding to the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. That anger and frustration is permeating social media, including TikTok. Many videos about the Israel-Hamas war are made by Gen Zers themselves and include self-deprecating humor and satirical content. TikTok users, especially those of Gen Z, tend to see the content in these videos as more credible than mainstream news and information sources because it comes from someone with whom the user shares a perceived common identity. And when trust on international security issues is based on identity rather than objective expertise, misinformation and disinformation can proliferate. This has inadvertently benefited al Qaeda.

If there is to be a revival in understanding al Qaeda among the younger generation, it must be grounded in the full contextual history of the group, warts and all, and not in soundbites, memes, and algorithms.