How TikTok became a 'battlefield' in Russia's war with Ukraine
Newsy
Russia’s disinformation campaign has gone a step further since the war in Ukraine: cloning legitimate and trusted news websites.
A TikTok video portraying a father and daughter, luxury cars and glamorous homes doesn’t seem out of the norm for the social media platform. But when that father is a former defense minister of Ukraine, and an AI voiceover falsely claims he misused Western funds to fund a lavish lifestyle, the TikTok has malicious intentions.
This TikTok video would become a “breadcrumb” to a massive Russian disinformation investigation, according to Andy Carvin, senior fellow and managing editor of the Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab. The TikTok video included old photos of Oleksii Reznikov, who was Ukraine's minister of defense until 2023, and his daughter Anastasia Shteingauz. It also used images traced back to real estate listings of, at the time, unpurchased property, according to Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRL).
Ultimately, the TikTok video was disseminated across thousands of fake TikTok accounts, according to a new report by the DFRL on Russia’s disinformation campaigns. In many cases, it was the only post on these accounts.
“The whole lot of them, when combined, clearly had a shared message of trying to convince the public that the Ukrainian government is corrupt, and they can't be trusted,” Carvin told Scripps News.
That “lot” amounted to nearly 13,000 TikTok accounts, which had a combined total of over 800,000 followers.
