Ukraine says Russian operatives dominating on TikTok as information war rages
- Flood of posts focus on Ukrainian President Zelensky’s legitimacy, official says
- Russia seen increasingly embracing TikTok as part of information war against Ukraine
Ukraine warned the Kremlin is expanding its use of TikTok to question the legitimacy of Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidency and undermine the nation’s morale as Russia presses its advantage in cyberspace as well as on the battlefield.
Russia’s legions of influencers and bots are behind a series of viral TikTok videos that zero in on May 20 – the date that Zelensky’s first term would have ended if the country’s election cycle hadn’t been disrupted because of martial law, according to Andriy Kovalenko, a senior official focused on Russia’s wartime dissemination of false information.
“Russia is dominating us on TikTok due to the scale” of its operation, Kovalenko, who leads a department under the National Security and Defence Council, said in an interview in Kyiv. “The Russians have begun working systematically on TikTok and are utilising this platform successfully.”
As Russia leverages its advantage in ammunition and manpower to exploit Ukraine’s dwindling stocks of weaponry, it has also increasingly embraced TikTok as part of its parallel information war.
The social media app owned by Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd is part of an arsenal that includes other platforms such as Telegram and X, formerly known as Twitter.