Ahead of the #RussiaProtests of yesterday many were amazed by the overwhelming amount of political content on Russian #Tiktok. I’ve been gathering some data on this (saw some people were interested @oonuch @Marielle_W_ ), sharing some (very prelim) highlights in the thread
Please read and interpret with caution: 1) the analysis is prelim (I will do more and hope to share some more insights at this virtual event on Feb 1 harriman.columbia.edu/virtual-event-… organized by @HarrimanInst)
2) the data is gathered from TikTok’s unofficial (!) API, and I most certainly don’t have all the tiktoks posted (though hopefully a high enough share, most popular ones seem to be in. but what’s lacking is unclear - it’s an algorithmic black box).
So it looks like the film about Putin’s palace triggered the interest in Navalny among Tiktokers 
There were smaller spikes of interest (as proxied by the number of tiktoks with #навальный (#navalny - for non-Rus speakers) hashtag in August after the poisoning and in Dec when the investigation by @fbkinfo @bellingcat and others was published
Though now it looks like (relatively) not too many people of “Tiktok generation” showed up in the end, the phenomenon is still interesting
Also it looks like quite many still showed up (or maybe “non-Gen-Z” just joined tiktok and started posting) as the number of tiktoks with #23января (#23january) and #навальный tags soared yesterday. These are mostly videos from the protests
Remarkably, the most popular videos after the protests are those related to the behavior of police.
The most popular - by the # of views - TikTok in my dataset that has over 10k tiktoks with a dozen protest-related hashtags is this one from yesterday’s protest in Chita where some police officers refused to disperse the rally. It had 9.7mil views as of today’s morning
Here it is tiktok.com/@chita.news/vi… (so i guess we can safely say that Russian Tiktok overwhelmingly supports the decision of these officers)
Other very popular videos from yesterday with over 5 million views include depictions of police brutality during the protests. I am not posting any links here and more precise descriptions as some of the videos depict people trying to fight off those detained
In #навальный dataset alone the second most popular video (after the one from Chita above) is a video from August (after the poisoning) with 7.9mil views.
The text on the video is “Did he really deserve it?”, and the video itself is a compilation of footage of various physical attacks on Navalny over the years tiktok.com/@upzimap/video…
Another super popular video in the dataset is this one that kinda blew up here on Twitter
https://twitter.com/tanjamaier17/status/1352194326017798145?s=20
It seems that mobilization-focused videos received less engagement than others but it is my opinion from the first glance, need to run more analysis to be able to properly verify this
Same applies to the videos that were taken down in response to the Roskomnadzor’s request. From the first glance I see no clear pattern there but need to run more analysis, maybe there is some logic (though it’s RKN, so I have doubts about this) @Marielle_W_
A fun fact in terms of the “sounds” that were used on a lot of the protest/Navalny-related videos - excerpts from IC3PEAK’s “Смерти больше нет” as well as the line “быть против власти не значит быть против родины”...
...(roughly “to be against the authorities does not mean to be against the homeland”) from a song by Russian rapper Face were esp in demand
So were this song (sometimes mixed together with Yuliia Navalnaya’s words from this videohttps://twitter.com/tvrain/status/1350809675948818434), a song about Navalny by MORGENSHTERN and (why?!) some old songs from t.A.T.u.
End of thread (for now) but if u have specific questions about this, pls post them in replies, will try to answer
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
