In the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Kremlin criminalized anything it considered to be false information. The app for Russia-based users was suspended on March 6. According to a new report, certain Russia-based accounts are still uploading videos to the platform, which in turn serves them to Russian users. It's called Shadow-promotion.
The report was released by the head of research at the nonprofit, which is funded by the Mozilla Foundation. TikTok's shadow-promotion keeps videos off of the creators' accounts, but promotes those videos to the For You Pages of other users. This is the first thing we have ever seen. Some verified accounts were able to dodge the ban altogether, with new content appearing under their accounts and in other users' feeds.
The researchers used a virtual private network to get a sense of what a Russia-based user would think of TikTok. If a user followed an international account, they wouldn't be able to see any videos on the account's page, but they would still see old content on their FYP. If the user followed Sputnik News, they would get new content on their FYP even if the page was empty.
"TikTok will say, 'We removed this number of accounts, we blocked this amount of videos,' and so on." "If we don't have an independent way to assess not just the content, but also the algorithmic promotion of the content on the platform, we'll never be able to assess if content moderation is actually in place or not."
He thinks that TikTok may have begun allowing these accounts to create new content in order to keep Russians on the platform.
He says that in order to not completely lose the market, they are probably trying to put back some features and some content. Many of the verified accounts that seem to have evaded the ban were focused on entertainment.
TikTok has faced less pressure from Moscow than did Google, which was fined $370 million in July for failing to remove content from YouTube.
Most international platforms keep their policies the same, like Facebook and YouTube, which are not removing anti-Putin content.
The country-by-country approach of TikTok could affect the future.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
