Early Thursday, a search for #lettertoamerica showed videos with 14.2 million views. By midday, as TikTok sought to block the content, searches on the site for “osama bin laden,” “bin laden letter” and “osama letter” and the hashtag #lettertoamerica yielded no results on the “videos” tab of TikTok, though some videos were still viewable with some digging.

Alex Haurek, a spokesman for TikTok, said that “content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism,” and that the company was “aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform.”

He said that most of the views came after news organizations wrote about the videos and that the letter had also “appeared across multiple platforms and the media.”

The White House weighed in on Thursday, saying “there is never a justification for spreading the repugnant, evil and antisemitic lies that the leader of Al Qaeda issued just after committing the worst terrorist attack in American history.”

“No one should ever insult the 2,977 American families still mourning loved ones by associating themselves with the vile words of Osama bin Laden,” Andrew J. Bates, a deputy White House press secretary, said in a statement. “Particularly now, at a time of rising antisemitic violence in the world, and just after Hamas terrorists carried out the worst slaughter of the Jewish people since the Holocaust in the name of the same conspiracy theories.”