The BBC accused Russia of launching a propaganda campaign through the TikTok application to spread misleading information about the war in Ukraine.
The BBC indicated that this campaign includes spreading misleading information about the war in Ukraine, using thousands of fake accounts, and aims to undermine Western support for Kyiv, and the campaign’s videos routinely attract millions of views.
Users in several European countries were subjected to false claims that senior Ukrainian officials and their relatives bought luxury cars or villas abroad after the Russian invasion in February 2022.
Fake TikTok videos played a role in the dismissal of Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov; Last September, according to his daughter, Anastasia Steinhaus.
TikTok Testimony
TikTok said it removed more than 12,000 fake accounts originating from Russia, including nearly 800 that were independently exposed by the BBC.
The daughter of the sacked Ukrainian Defense Minister told the BBC that she discovered the Russian disinformation campaign when she received a surprise call from her husband while on vacation.
She continued by saying, “My husband said to me: Well, you now have a villa in Madrid, and he sent me a link to a video clip on TikTok, with my voice faked by artificial intelligence, saying that I had bought a house in the Spanish capital.”
She explained, but the next morning, her husband sent her a similar clip on TikTok, claiming that she had bought a villa on the French Riviera, and the video clips were circulated among her friends before it finally reached her husband.
Steinhaus says she does not own real estate in Spain, France or “anywhere else outside Ukraine.”
The BBC also traced images of homes in Madrid and Cannes to two local property websites, both of which were still for sale.
Other videos directly targeted her father.
The videos sent to Steinhaus belong to a vast Russia-based network of fake TikTok accounts posing as real users from Germany, France, Poland, Israel and Ukraine.
Using a combination of hashtag searches and TikTok’s own recommendations, BBC Verify was able to track down hundreds of similar videos targeting dozens of Ukrainian officials.
The accounts that posted it used stolen personal photos, including photos of celebrities, such as Scarlett Johansson, Emma Watson and Colin Farrell.
TikTok videos
With a few exceptions, they posted only one video each, a tactic TikTok says is new and aims to avoid detection and manipulate the platform’s system of recommending videos to users.
The efforts appear to have been coordinated, according to the BBC, as sometimes videos were released by different accounts on the same day and included identical or very similar texts.
During the investigation, the BBC found consistent circumstantial evidence pointing to a possible Russian origin of the network.
This included linguistic errors typical of Russian speakers, including some Russian phrases that are not used in other languages.
Many of the videos also contained links to a website previously exposed by Meta as part of a Russia-linked network impersonating legitimate Western news sites.
Many of the videos analyzed by the BBC targeted the sacked Ukrainian Defense Minister, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials, portraying them as obsessed with money and unconcerned with ordinary Ukrainians or the war effort.
Steinhaus believes this constant drip of insinuations played a role in her father’s firing: “It affected my father’s life and his career.”
Steinhaus said one video might not have had any effect, but “when it’s broadcast five times from different parts of the world and within the country, it starts working.”
Reznikov lost his job amid an anti-corruption campaign and several scandals at the Defense Ministry that included the purchase of goods and equipment for the army at inflated prices. However, he was not personally accused of corruption.
Investigations on TikTok Vedios
Roman Osadchuk of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Laboratory, which investigated the network in collaboration with the BBC, said the fake accounts targeting Ukrainians were trying to undermine their trust in the country’s leadership.
He added: “They are trying to make Ukraine less flexible in some way, and make Ukrainian society stop fighting the Russians.”
The videos’ focus on corruption in Ukraine’s war effort was particularly aimed at the West, says Rene DiResta, director of technical research at the Stanford Internet Observatory.
He continued by saying, “All these different things that they claim about Ukrainian officials would undermine the continued support, especially by European countries, for the Ukrainian war effort.”
