‘We miss you’: TikTok sees resurrection of Hitler support, Sky News investigation finds

Adolf Hitler is the latest historical mass murderer to undergo a revival on TikTok, a Sky News investigation published on Friday found, with many of his Nazi speeches featuring as soundtracks across 72,534 videos.

In November, Al Qaeda terrorist Osama Bin Laden, responsible for the September 11 attacks on New York, was commended by the short-form video hosting service's users, as reported by The Jerusalem Post. 

The videos featuring speeches by Hitler and other Nazi figures reportedly garnered high levels of engagement, sometimes receiving millions of likes from users.

One such post listed in the investigation blamed Jews for the “Islamisation of Europe.”

Between September 2 and 3 alone, the investigation found 50,023 posts with sound clips from Hitler and Nazi chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

Using music to spread Nazi ideology

The speech's reach is reportedly maximized by setting it with a popular music Drift Phonk - without the creators' permission or knowledge.

"I was not previously aware that my music was being used in this way, and I find it shocking and deplorable,” Vivian Moon, professionally known as Pastel Ghost, told Sky News after the site made the musician aware of the videos. "My team and I are actively scouring TikTok and other platforms to take down all instances like this where my work is being used to promote hateful ideology."

One post, which gained over 56,700 likes, featured an image of a Nuremberg Rally accompanied by a Hitler speech.

A comment on the post, receiving 1,695 likes, read  "modern society absolutely needs him." 

Another comment on the Nuremberg post read "We miss you".

A TikTok spokesperson told Sky News, "This content was immediately removed for breaching our strict policies against hate speech. We regularly train our safety professionals and update our safeguards to detect hateful behaviour on an ongoing basis, and we remove 91% of this type of content before it is reported to us."

Assessing the popularity of Nazi posts, Sky News said it monitored the five most used sounds made from Nazi speeches and recorded the engagement on the 10 most popular posts using each one.

The 50 posts gained a combined total of over 13.7 million likes.