Russia’s war in Ukraine is intensifying on social media, especially on TikTok, where Ukraine is struggling to have a presence, with misinformation spreading through the country and undermining morale.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Andriy Kovalenko, head of a department on Russian disinformation in Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, warned that Russia is using a legion of TikTok influencers and bots to create and inflate viral videos against the country.
In particular, most videos recently have focused on May 20, when Volodymyr Zelenskyy was supposed to end his first term as president of Ukraine. However, elections have been postponed due to the country’s current martial law.
Russia’s disinformation efforts are not limited to TikTok but extend to Telegram and X. According to Kovalenko, they are succeeding due to “the scale” of the effort and their skills in manipulating TikTok’s algorithm. They open accounts using fake Ukrainian SIM cards and falsify their geographic location to appear in Ukraine.
Kovalenko admitted, “there aren’t many Ukrainian bloggers on TikTok and those who are doing it aren’t inflating hits.” He vowed to strengthen the department’s focus on TikTok and added that a ban on the app is not currently in the works.
To combat disinformation and asymmetric warfare on social media, Ukraine is inviting TikTok and other social media to open fully staffed offices in the country.
In its fourth-quarter report, TikTok noted it found several covert influence operations that wanted to influence the narrative on the war for both the pro-Russia and pro-Ukraine camps and as part of its effort to eliminate misinformation, TikTok eliminated two million videos in Ukraine for misinformation during the same period.
TikTok is currently under fire in the West after US President Joe Biden signed a law calling on its Chinese owner ByteDance to divest the app or face a ban in the United States. In Europe, the European Commission has been issuing warnings over privacy concerns. The US and the EU suspect China may use TikTok to gather illegal information on its users.
