In the surest sign yet that Twitter's relevance is swiftly disappearing, it became the locus of a particularly silly "kids these days" moral panic last week. It started when Twitter personality Yashar Ali decided to rile up his over 700,000 followers on the platform now called X by posting a video purporting to show that it had suddenly become trendy on TikTok for young people to read quotes from Osama bin Laden's 2002 "Letter to America" and exclaim how much they agreed with the now-deceased terrorist leader.
People took it seriously. Multiple news outlets rushed outraged responses. Even the White House fell for it. But there should have been more skepticism. Ali, after all, was exposed in a 2021 Los Angeles Magazine as a shady character who makes money and gains status with untrustworthy social media content meant to manipulate less-than-savvy internet users. So it's no surprise the story was swiftly debunked by tech journalists who pointed out that the trend amounted to just a few trolls.
