Gone are the videos of Charli d’Amelio, Addison Rae, Will Smith, Maneskin, Zach King and other stars on the platform. Since Tuesday, March 8, TikTok users present on the territory of the Russian Federation no longer have access to videos posted from abroad, according to the findings of researchers from Tracking Exposed, a Franco-Italian non-profit organization funded by the Mozilla Foundation, among others, and specializing in the analysis of recommendation systems on platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Amazon. On the homepage – the “For you” feed – only content produced in Russia now appears.
This is also what was observed The world. Again on Thursday March 10, videos posted by TikTok accounts, such as those of Emmanuel Macron, from World or foreign celebrities no longer appeared on devices using Russian IP addresses (the address of a machine connected to the Internet). If the personality’s account is displayed, the “wall” where their videos are supposed to appear remains blank. The same goes for media like the BBC, even though the Russian site of British radio remains available and referenced online.
Tracking Exposed was also able to confirm that TikTok had, like the platform announced on March 6suspended the publication of videos from Russian soil, due to the recent legislation imposed by the Kremlin, which provides for sentences of up to fifteen years in prison for journalists as well as for individuals, Russian or foreign, who would spread from “false information about the army”. On the other hand, TikTok had not announced the filtering of foreign content.
Restricted access to old Russian videos
“We first noticed on Monday March 7 that the search function in TikTok was blocked. We could not do any research, even innocuous, like that of the keyword “music”. The next day, almost all TikTok content was no longer accessible in Russia. It is not the Russian Internet network, but TikTok which is at the origin of this blocking”, concludes Marc Faddoul, co-director of Tracking Exposed. Conversely, the content downloaded and published from Russia in the social network remained available for consultation by Internet users abroad.
In recent days, researchers have multiplied the requests and navigations on the application. “We have an infrastructure to analyze the behavior of TikTok’s recommendation algorithm in different countries, using VPNs [des outils qui permettent aux internautes de masquer en partie leur identité en ligne] and a network of residential IP addressesexplains Marc Faddoul. We also have tools to automate these tests at scale, while logging pages returned from TikTok’s servers under different conditions. » In this specific case, browsing via VPN or residential IP addresses in Russia leads to the same results, the team specifies.
Coarse filtering
More than precise political censorship, researchers believe it is a “coarse filtering based on geolocation”. Indeed, the page of the main opponent of the Kremlin, Alexeï Navalny, remained for example searchable. However, remarked Marc Faddoul, “a search for the keyword Ukraine returns a large majority of pro-Russian content”. Also, last week, of Russian-speaking netizens noted that dozens of accounts of TikTok influencers served the exact same speech, ensuring that Russia wanted nothing more than a return to peace.
Today, Russians only have access to content posted by their fellow citizens, and only if they were posted before the start of the week. Some creators, however, have been able to trick themselves into using VPNs to post later.
A situation reminiscent of that of China, where TikTok is replaced by a similar application (Douyin) operating in a closed circuit. “We seem to be witnessing an unprecedented fracture of a global social network, which now exposes two completely distinct content bases between Russia and the rest of the world”remarks Marc Faddoul, who qualifies it as “splinternet” [Internet fragmenté].
Crucial element of misinformation
This blockage once again questions the ambivalent position of the Beijing social network since the start of the war in Ukraine. In the early days of the conflict, TikTok had joined the concert of social networks which had decided to block the accounts of RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik accused of spreading Kremlin propaganda.
In Russia, however, RT remains available without restriction. “State-controlled media outlets like RT [anciennement Russia Today], Sputnik and RIA Novosti are active on TikTok and have used the platform to post and promote Russian disinformation stories related to Ukraine, before and after the invasion,” estimates the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), laboratory who monitored the propaganda activity on this social network in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, for whom “it is clear that TikTok is a crucial part of the Kremlin’s disinformation apparatus”.
Contacted by The world on this subject, TikTok, which did not wish to comment on the question of the blocking of foreign content in Russia, refers to his press release posted on March 5 : “We are closely monitoring the situation, and have allocated additional resources for the moderation of content in Ukraine and Russia that would violate our rules, including disinformation, hate speech or incitement to violence”thus justifies the social network, before recalling that:
“In addition, we have decided to accelerate the deployment of our policy related to state-controlled media to give our users more elements of context in order to better understand the content they watch on TikTok. »