A vast Russian influence operation on TikTok involving 12,800 fake accounts spreading disinformation about the war in Ukraine to millions of users in Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Israel and Ukraine, has been uncovered by BBC Verify and @DFRLab.
bbc.co.uk/news/world-eur…
Back in the summer, this video, featuing an AI-generated voice, racked up millions of views on TikTok and later on Twitter.
It falsely accused Ukraine's former defence minister Oleksiy Reznikov and his daughter Anastasiya Shteinhauz of buying a a €7m villa in Cannes, France.
We debunked the viral video back in July. The villa seen in the video wasn't bought by Reznikov, and was actually up for sale.
So, @O_Rob1nson, @adkrobinson and I tried to find out more about the account that originally posted that video to TikTok.
The TikTok account was called "Vladyslav Yashchenko 1".
A few things about the account caught our attention: It had only posted that one video with 1.7m views, its profile picture was a stock image of a random guy, it had several other back up accounts with the same name.
Using hashtag searches, we found similar TikTok accounts.
Here's "Andrea Miller 421" with a profile photo of Chris Evans and only one video featuring an AI-generated voice and a series of still images, falsely accusing Reznikov and Shteinhauz of buying a villa in Madrid.
We soon found similar accounts in multiple languages: Ukrainian, German, French, Russian and Polish.
Nearly all of them had posted one video pushing anti-Ukrainian and pro-Kremlin narratives with Al-generated voice and a stolen profile picture. Some videos had millions of views.
The operation was careful in covering its traces, and never posted the same video from two different accounts. But mistakes were made.
We, for instance, found multiple accounts with the same stolen profile photo but different names.
We found over 800 fake TikTok accounts that seemed to be part of the same operation in five languages, with over 80 million views in total.
The videos targeted dozens of senior Ukrainian officials, portraying them as obsessed with money and uncaring about Ukrainians or the war.
There were linguistic mistakes in some videos typical of Russian speakers, including some Russian phrases that are not used in other languages.
A website previously exposed by Meta as part of a Russian-linked network also appeared in some of the videos we found.
We presented the accounts we'd found to TikTok, whose internal investigation found fake videos in two more languages - Italian and English.
TikTok confirmed this was a sophisticated, covert operation based in Russia, and removed 12,820 accounts.
tiktok.com/transparency/e…
This is likely the largest influence operation ever uncovered on TikTok.
Its videos, pushing disinformation about Ukraine, have been viewed tens of millions of times in multiple languages, and reposted on other major platforms.
Read our report here.
bbc.co.uk/news/world-eur…
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