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Hundreds of videos from the war in Ukraine are published on TikTok. Among them are numerous recordings that are old or come from other conflicts – and yet generate a wide range.
By Carla Reveland, Editor ARD fact finder
Videos with the hashtag #Ukraine were viewed more than 22 billion times in just a few days. A million more views are added every minute, writes British journalist Chris Stokel-Walker. During the war in Ukraine, the TikTok video platform has become an important source of information and an exchange platform for videos and images.
Whether videos of Russian tanks on the way to Ukraine, rocket attacks on Ukrainian cities, dancing soldiers or instructions on how to drive captured Russian tanks: it is a difficult to understand mixture of immediate impressions of the war, propaganda and disinformation. We’re talking about the first “TikTok war”. According to the “New York Times” the amount of war content in the app far outweighs what can be found on other social networks.
Individual postings with a high reach
“TikTok is special here because individual postings can generate much greater reach,” says Marcus Bösch, who researches TikTok and disinformation at HAW Hamburg, at the request of the ARD fact finder. For example, a video showing Ukrainian soldiers at the front dancing to the Nirvana song “Smells like Teen Spirit” has been viewed almost 60 million times. Another video from the same account has 84 million views and shows a soldier dancing the well-known “moonwalk” to Michael Jackson.
The video of the “Moonwalk” dancing soldier has 13.6 million likes.
On TikTok, current video material directly from the scene is often the first to be seen. Because the Chinese app allows users to upload videos quickly and easily.
Restriction of important functions in Russia
For Russian users, however, these central functions have been restricted. Since March 6, both the making of new videos and live streaming have been suspended in Russia in response to Putin’s media law, which sanctions jail sentences for statements that deviate from the Kremlin’s portrayal of the Ukraine war.
These changes in the law would have left TikTok no other choice, the company writes on Twitter. However, this also makes organizing protests within Russia more difficult, says TikTok researcher Bösch. Likewise, the public loses a veritable source of information outside of Russia.
disinformation on tik tok
But not only veritable videos are spreading on TikTok. As on all platforms, disinformation can also be found on TikTok – there are many videos taken out of context or old images that are falsely supposed to show the current war in Ukraine.
However, new, platform-specific forms of manipulated videos are also spreading on TikTok. TikTok’s audio function, for example, allows users to remove the sounds or music from a video and then overlay it over their own material. This audio feature is typically used for lip syncing or dancing videos on TikTok, which is how the platform originally got its fame.
This function is used en masse to manipulate videos in connection with the Ukraine war. An example is a video showing a reporter standing in front of people covered with body bags. It is said to show moving Ukrainian bodies, thereby proving that the war in Ukraine is a hoax or “Western propaganda”. By exchanging the original sound and replacing it with music, for example, the impression can be created that it is a reporter in Ukraine. In fact, the video comes from a climate protest in Austria in February.
Russian propaganda
Russian state media such as “RT”, “Sputnik News” or “RIA Novosti” used TikTok during the Ukraine war to spread disinformation, which, for example, described Ukraine as an aggressor or defamed the Ukrainian government as Nazis. A study of “Institute for Strategic Dialogue” (ISD) comes to the conclusion that the TikTok platform in particular is extremely important for Russian state media.
In an analysis, ISD study author Ciarán O’Connor shows that selected TikTok videos can achieve a higher reach faster than similar YouTube videos. 83 TikTok videos by the Russian news agency RIA Novosti have a reach of 28.7 million. During the same period, RIA uploaded 462 videos to YouTube, which received 26.2 million views, meaning RIA content performs better on TikTok than YouTube. That’s particularly notable given that the focus of reporting over the past few years has been “how Russian state-sponsored news organizations have built a sizeable audience on YouTube over the past few years,” O’Connor tells dem ARD fact finder.
A Spanish-language TikTok video created by Sputnik claiming that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy fled Kiev has been viewed more than 2.3 million times. Despite the evidence of the President’s continued stay in Kyiv, neither Sputnik nor Tass have removed, retracted or corrected their misinformation.
In the meantime, TikTok has announced that it will block the content of Russian state media accounts outside of Russia in order to prevent or complicate propaganda attempts by the Russian side. However, research by O’Connor shows that many accounts are still available. “Geo-blocking is still quite inconsistent,” he told the ARD fact finder.
Influencer part of the Russian information war
In a concerted effort, Russian influencers apparently posted videos on TikTok in which they used the hashtag #давайзамир (#letsgoforpeace) to spread the Russian narrative of the “peace mission” and were allegedly paid for it. Like the think tank “The Atlantic Council” reported from Washington DC, the formulations in the videos were so similar or identical that a campaign must be assumed. For example, the videos said: “Everyone blames Russia, but turns a blind eye to the fact that Donbass has been under fire for eight years.” Several Russian TikTokers reported being offered money to publish such videos.
The videos of the campaign have since been deleted. But behind the hashtags #istandwithRussia, #istandwithPutin and #RLM – “Russian Lives Maters”. further pro-Russian campaignswhich are seen millions of times.
Zelenskyi appeals to Russian TikTokers
Not all Russian TikTokers are behind the Kremlin. For example, the Russian influencer @glebasee clearly states in a video that has been viewed more than a million times that he does not want war. Many others express themselves similarly – although in the worst case they can even face a prison sentence.
Even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi addressed these Russian TikTokers in a speech and appealed that they could help end the war. This shows once again how relevant the platform has become.
According to TikTok researcher Bösch, TikTok has between 20 and 40 million users in Russia. How far-reaching the restriction of Russian content will be for the platform and its content is still unclear. “Time will tell if TikTok’s decision to suspend content from Russia results in state-backed media also limiting their ability to use the platform,” O’Connor said. It will be seen whether the positive or negative effects outweigh the negative ones.