Photo: AP Photo/Alexei Alexandrov
The spread of disinformation and half-verified information has accompanied the war in Ukraine since its very beginning. Social networks serve as effective nurseries of manipulative, propaganda and false content. TikTok occupies a special place in the information war, precisely because it primarily gathers a younger audience
The social network TikTok has become very popular in the past year. Her popularity is growing more and more in Serbia, especially among the younger population. It offers a wide range of content, but also "information", or rather "disinformation" about certain events - including the war in Ukraine. The algorithm of the application is such that some propaganda content in Serbia can very quickly reach several tens of thousands of views.
This application is used by more than a billion people worldwide, and as the BBC wrote less than a month ago, more than half of the users are under thirty years old. In Serbia, that percentage is probably even higher in favor of the younger population.
When you take into account that most young people are informed on social networks, and the availability of propaganda content about the Russian invasion, it is not at all surprising that on the streets of Belgrade, you can meet young people every day who wear signs of some kind of support for Russia.
Unlike Facebook or Twitter, which have a long history of spreading misinformation, but also certain mechanisms that control fake news to some extent, there is practically no content control on TikTok. Also, the application does not offer any special tools to fake news researchers, which makes their job difficult - they basically have to do everything manually, unlike other networks, which consequently reduces the ability to monitor and control the network.
As all the content on TikTok is in short video format, videos that date back and actually have nothing to do with the war in Ukraine, or maybe they are from this conflict, but where and how they originated, are most often used to spread disinformation. In one of its investigations, the BBC found war footage dating from Syria, Libya and Chechnya. The content on TikTok is mostly accompanied by "exclusive" messages that should convince users that it is actually the real "truth" that they cannot see. on traditional media.
The search usually takes place through "hashtags" that represent certain topics, but the algorithm is designed in such a way that it will create a patent of content for the user that will be thrown out more often than others. So for someone who may have only once been informed about something on TikTok, the network itself begins to throw out content of a similar nature, and the vicious circle continues. The same is the case, for example, on Facebook.
In Serbia, there are quite a few videos from Mariupol, as well as those in which attempts are made to generalize the entire Ukrainian army with the term "Nazification", while on the other hand, propaganda activities from the other side are also noticeable.
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