Recommender algorithms on TikTok and Rumble expose UK minors to antisemitic content, the UK’s Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) revealed in its new Amplifying Antisemitism report.
To carry out the report, analysts created 10 TikTok profiles representing 15-year-old users with varied political and cultural interests, including neutral interest in the Israel-Palestine conflict, left- and right-wing political interest, male lifestyle influencer content, far-right content, and two neutral accounts.
The profiles were prompted toward relevant topics for each interest through an hour and a half of manual content viewing, followed by content engagement via a bespoke bot over 14 days, resulting in over 5,500 recommended videos.
Thematic analysis clustered content into 10 core themes, revealing pathways from neutral lifestyle content to highly politicized and conspiratorial clusters. Relevant themes were manually reviewed, revealing that harmful content persisted through videos, comments, and TikTok’s sticker and sound features, illustrating systemic gaps in safeguarding minors.
Among some of the more striking findings were that a 15-year-old boy interested in male lifestyle influencers only needed to be on TikTok for an hour before being served antisemitic conspiracy theories, and that 15-year-old boy with interest in left-wing politics only needed to spend an hour and a half on TikTok before being served content from Hamas former spokesperson Abu Obeida, or videos glorifying the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
ISD also found that stickers, sounds, and comment sections on TikTok acted as bridges between potentially benign videos and more overt antisemitic content. Examples include Holocaust memes, neo-Nazi imagery, and far-right codes.
Rumble hosts more antisemitic content than TikTok
On Rumble, analysts collected 4,412 videos from the platform’s Editor’s Picks over six months. Analysts filtered for antisemitism-related keywords and reviewed 259 videos potentially relevant to antisemitism.
The analysts found that Rumble hosts more overt antisemitic content than TikTok, including slurs, Holocaust distortion, and conspiracies about Jewish control.
Unlike TikTok’s gradual escalation toward extremist content, Rumble’s Editor’s Picks section exposed minors to direct antisemitic slurs, conspiracy myths, and calls to violence from the outset. Its non-account model makes harmful content available to any user, which is surfaced through its algorithm.
The themes that were more present on Rumble as compared to TikTok were: The Israel lobby and George Soros conspiracies, the Khazar myth and the denial of Ashkenazi Jews, and 9/11 conspiracies.
ISD said the findings raised critical questions for the enforcement of the Online Safety Act and whether current platform responses have met the established requirements.
It said that effective enforcement would require platforms to move beyond reactive takedowns toward systemic interventions: algorithmic transparency, proactive and more informed detection of visual and coded hate, and stricter enforcement of policies relating to use of interactive features.
“Without these measures, recommender systems will continue to serve as vectors for antisemitic harm, undermining the OSA’s core objective of safeguarding children online and further contributing to the normalization of a culture of antisemitism among young people in the UK,” ISD concluded.