Pro-Russian propaganda hidden on TikTok

Published on : 01/10/2021 – 18:19

In this episode of Info or Intox, Alexandre Capron returns to a video showing a woman standing in the middle of the rubble, crying. Alarms sound in the background and as the camera moves, it shows people making their way through the debris. This woman yells at the camera, “Mr. Trump, please! Please stop this!” The text added by a TikTok publication to the video indicates that the woman would ask Donald Trump to prevent President Joe Biden from “harming the innocent”, and therefore that the American president would be responsible for these bombings.

This video has had over 500,000 likes on TikTok. But on closer inspection, the exact context has absolutely nothing to do with it: the video was taken in July 2019, even though Joe Biden was not even a presidential candidate, let alone president.

This type of misinformation is particularly common on TikTok: this is what has noticed Sophia Kathryn aka @florida_sophia (her full name has been changed to preserve her identity), a student at Columbia University in New York. She was particularly interested in the account Soapbox.

Soapbox regularly posts anti-American and often misleading content, particularly on the situation in Syria. The media is part of the Maffick group, which also includes the media “In the now” and “Wasted”. According to CNN, who was able to consult the group’s registration documents, Maffick is 51% owned by Russia Today, the main Russian public channel. Its director is Anissa Nouai, a former journalist for Russia Today.

On Facebook and Twitter, the account was flagged as “Russian state-controlled media”. TikTok, however, did not put out such a warning. For its part, Soapbox, has always denied any Russian interference, claiming to be an “independent” media, and has continued Facebook in summer 2020 for forcing the platform to display this label.