Humor and news. How Russian propaganda leaks into Ukrainian TikTok

The popularity of short, vertical videos is accelerating. Now, TikTok features not only strange dances, but also bloggers, war videos, and political news. This year, TikTok boasts 12 million active adult Ukrainian users. This summer, 25% of Ukrainians stated they used it for news consumption.

However, there's a nuance. In Russia, TikTok is "protected" from foreign interference—Russian users since March 2022 have lost the ability to view videos from outside the Russian Federation. TikTok implemented this at the Kremlin's behest. This strict localization was confirmed by Norwegian journalists, who in April 2022 compared TikTok feeds in Belgorod and Kharkiv: the former displayed jokes and entertainment, while the latter showed war and the consequences of Russian shelling.

In Ukraine, however, TikTok does not subject videos to such moderation. In fact, the platform often lacks reliable protection against Russian content.

We noted that most Russian content appears in humorous videos from professional comedians or those aspiring to be.

Russian Jokes about Russia for Ukrainians

We downloaded 150,000 videos with "neutral" and humorous hashtags and Ukrainian localization. We decided to search by hashtags because they not only provide convenient topic-specific search but also act as keywords, helping TikTok better understand the video content and accordingly recommend it to the target audience.

We intentionally chose hashtags in both Ukrainian and Russian, as Ukrainian TikTok is not limited to content in the Ukrainian language. And Russian content should be restricted for Ukrainians by the platform itself.

We hoped to explore what videos Ukrainians are making, but instead, we saw how the platform offers Russian humor to Ukrainians. Highly politicized Russian humor.

For instance, a search from a Ukrainian account using the hashtag #весело (fun) can yield videos with a Ukrainian dog as well as from the Russian Comedy Club (known for its racist, sexist, and often propagandist videos).

The best defense against Russian videos is obvious. If you're looking for jokes, search for them in Ukrainian (also avoid hashtags that sound the same in Russian and Ukrainian, like #весело).

And try not to watch any (even non-political) videos with Russian humor. Because every viewed video, let's say from someone like Galustyan, increases the likelihood that he will reappear in your feed. And this time, jokes might be not about spiders, but with a racist skit on geopolitics.

Interested in Ukraine? Get Russian propaganda!

But it's not just the humorous hashtags that lead Ukrainians to Russian content. Our collected data confirmed that Russian videos often infiltrated Ukrainian search results through hashtags like #украина or #ukraine.

Among the unexpected findings were several videos from the Russian propagandist "RIA Novosti", which TikTok marks as a channel controlled by the Russian state, yet still recommends it to Ukrainians. By the way, neither Facebook nor YouTube tolerate such 100% selective propagandist content and restrict it. The accounts of Russian state media are also blocked there.

Until 2023, Twitter (now X) set a creative example in the fight against Russian propaganda. Russian state-controlled media were under a shadow ban, meaning they couldn't be found, even when deliberately searched for by name. Especially, one would not see their tweet in the search results for a hashtag. Only a direct link allowed finding and subscribing to the channel.

However, on TikTok, Russian propagandists not only have their official pages, but also freely appear in feeds of Ukrainian users who are interested in "similar" content.

Most likely, this blatant anti-Ukrainian propaganda ends up in the feeds of those who want to watch it. But it shouldn't be there for Ukrainian users at all. Thus, TikTok remains the only window through which the Russian propaganda machine can work on the Ukrainian audience without special tricks.

It's not just limited to official Russian propaganda. On screenshots below are just a few striking examples of other Russian TikTok content, which often included the Ukrainian flag or even the hashtag #україна (Ukraine) in the description.

There's a bracelet weaving with the Russian tricolor; a girl in a kokoshnik (tagged with #нетвойне, "no war"); symbols of the invasion "Z"; videos with a Ukrainian prisoner of war and Putin himself. In other words, the entire propagandist's toolkit.

Under the hashtag #украина (Ukraine), one finds prophecies by Vanga predicting Russia's victory, Russian schoolchildren either extolling the virtues of the Russian army or advocating for peace while blaming Zelensky or NATO, and common accusations that Ukrainians engage in deceit and propaganda. There are also videos from groups like Kadyrov's forces or the Wagner Group discussing front-line situations, however, less frequent. This particular hashtag presents a dual nature of content. It showcases motivational dances from Ukrainian soldiers, juxtaposed with Russian fabrications that mimic these soldiers.

Russian content, as observed, seeps into a diverse array of topics and search queries, a pattern clear in the network of hashtags below.

Searching for Russian Hashtags

Our approach involved selecting over 200 hashtags, none of which were inherently tied to politics, news, or war. The search extended beyond humor-related tags like #joke, and #fun, encompassing tags related to Ukraine (#🇺🇦, #ukraine) and various “technical” TikTok tags. These tags, often used by platform users — though their effectiveness is debatable — are part of a long-standing tradition. Users frequently add tags like #rec or #tiktoktop to a broad range of videos.

Our search strategy was non-specific; we didn't target any particular account. Instead, we explored the breadth of content the platform suggests to a hypothetical, non-existent Ukrainian user for each selected hashtag.

TikTok - Not Quite Telegram

Despite all our findings (and the platform's Chinese origins), TikTok has one advantage: content moderation.

On TikTok's website, there's even a separate page where they describe principles for combating misinformation, albeit very generally and abstractly. Videos identified as harmful by algorithms can be hidden from the "For You" recommendations, and if confirmed by the moderation team, they can be completely removed from the platform.

This results from TikTok's evolution from an entertainment platform for teen dances and flash mobs to one that aggregates and continuously challenges a vast amount of war-related video content since the start of the full-scale invasion.

Today, TikTok is constantly refining its algorithms for detecting false and harmful information. For instance, introducing procedures to verify video authenticity against databases, and countering fakes created using old videos with new audio tracks.

There is evidence that TikTok officially adopts a pro-Ukrainian stance. From an interview with a Ukrainian-speaking platform moderator, we know that the "Z" symbol, Russian fakes about staged events in Bucha, or claims about Ukrainian Nazis are considered serious violations of the platform's rules. However, this doesn't mean such content is absent or that the rules have removed the false designation of the "Azov" regiment as international terrorists.

It is important to remember that for moderating Ukrainian content (which as of fall 2022 could be merged into one moderated category with Russian content), TikTok employs hired Ukrainian-Russian speaking moderators, rather than collaborating with leading fact-checking organizations like StopFake or VoxCheck.

From time to time, we see reports about the large-scale removal of bot networks. For instance, the deletion of 1,700 Russian bots spreading Russian narratives in European countries at the beginning of 2023.

Or sometimes, even in the Ukrainian segment, we can observe the aftermath of purging fraudulent accounts. These accounts, through the distribution of clickbait and manipulative videos, attempt to redirect Ukrainians to private Telegram channels. In these channels, manipulators can freely operate without any constraints of adhering to moderation rules.

However, even with such moderation, much content remains in a gray area. Here, we encounter both manipulative Ukrainian videos about corruption or mobilization, and a plethora of Russian content, often carrying anti-Ukrainian messages.

Even when it doesn't directly violate the platform's rules, it subtly reinforces official Russian propaganda with a "peace at all costs" stance or narratives about brotherly nations and deceitful Americans. This is often done in a humorous tone, even by Russian comedians well-known to Ukrainians.

TikTok vs. Researchers

One area where TikTok falls short compared to Telegram is the lack of an official API, and with it, a straightforward and efficient method for extracting data from the platform for further analysis. To identify disinformation campaigns, researchers either have to write custom scraping programs – which TikTok actively combats by increasing captcha challenges (tasks to verify you're not a robot collecting data from the platform) – or resort to paid services that sell TikTok data and might have certain functional limitations or provide incomplete information.

The other side of the coin is the recommendation algorithms. We don't know exactly how TikTok selects videos for each user, how it identifies similar videos, the extent to which it considers text descriptions and hashtags, or the role of user and content creator geolocation. TikTok's recommendation algorithms (and those of most other algorithm-based social networks) remain a black box, allowing us to study only the result, not the causes of the recommendations. Therefore, to make assumptions about how TikTok "protects" Russians from foreign content, we have to create artificial profiles with Russian IP addresses, as done by Norwegian journalists. To see if the platform offers Russian propagandist videos to Ukrainian users, we have to conduct tens of thousands of search queries from Ukraine (the path we took in this study).

Considering the increasingly significant role of social networks in information dissemination, the black box of algorithms, combined with the lack of data access, could easily become another powerful weapon in the information war.

Interns from Texty.org.ua Darya Agafonova, Vladyslav Bilyk, Kateryna Vdovtsova, Volodymyr Demkiv, and Kateryna Shapochkina also worked on the project