The Guardian Removes Text of Bin Laden Letter After It Goes Viral for All the Wrong Reasons
AP Photo/Rahimullah Yousafzai
The Guardian removed the text of Osama bin Laden’s infamous “Letter to America” on Wednesday after it went viral on TikTok and received sympathy from young users.
“This page previously displayed a document containing, in translation, the full text of Osama bin Laden’s ‘letter to the American people’, as reported in the Observer on Sunday 24 November 2002,” declared the Guardian in a notice where the text had previously been. “The document, which was published here on the same day, was removed on 15 November 2023.”
According to a report published by Rolling Stone, the Guardian removed the text — which had been available to read for more than 20 years — after it went viral on TikTok this week.
Bin Laden’s words reportedly received sympathy from thousands of young TikTok users, who recorded themselves expressing support for the contents of the letter and encouraging others to read it for themselves.
“This morning, I read ‘Letter to America,’ which is Osama bin Laden’s letter to America explaining why he attacked Americans, and I am ashamed to say that I not only have never read this letter, but I didn’t even know this letter existed,” said one TikTok user in a video. “It’s wild and everyone should read it. If you haven’t read it yet, read it. However, be forewarned that this has left me very disillusioned.”
In another video, a TikTok user told her viewers, “So I just read ‘A Letter to America’ and I will never look at life the same. I will never look at this country the same. I will never— please read it, and if you have read it, let me know if you are also going through an existential crisis in this very moment, because in the last twenty minutes my entire viewpoint on the entire life I have believed and I have lived has changed.”
In yet another video, a TikTok user claimed, “Reading this letter, it becomes apparent to me that the actions of 9/11 and those acts committed against the USA and it’s people were all just the build up of our government failing other nations,” while others on the platform also claimed to be going through an “existential crisis” knowing that bin Laden “was right.”
The Guardian, in a statement, claimed that it removed the text after it became “widely shared” on social media “without its original context.”
“Therefore we have decided to take it down and direct readers to the news article that originally contextualized it instead,” the newspaper said.
TikTok also condemned the videos in a statement.
“Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism. We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform,” a TikTok spokesperson told Mediaite. “The number of videos on TikTok is small and reports of it trending on our platform are inaccurate. This is not unique to TikTok and has appeared across multiple platforms and the media.”
