Ukraine: when TikTok becomes a propaganda tool for Wagner's Russian mercenaries

The Russian Wagner militia seems to have made TikTok its propaganda tool par excellence. An American disinformation content monitoring company on the Internet called NewsGuard pointed out in a report, published this Thursday, December 1, the presence of "hundreds of" hateful videos "promoting, using violent images and of music", of this group of Russian mercenaries present on the Ukrainian front, known for their cruelty.

This private militia became known to the international community in 2014 for its presence in eastern Ukraine in 2014. Its boss, the oligarch Yevgueni Prigojine, is actually close to Vladimir Putin. Wagner's men have been fighting alongside the Russian army since the start of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. According to British intelligence, Putin also owes this group of mercenaries significant advances in Donetsk, such as the socket of the largest power plant in Ukraine. Several members of Wagner or personalities linked to the group have been sanctioned by the European Union for human rights violations, and accused by Ukraine of war crimes, in particular the murder or torture of civilians.

Most of the videos "show or allude to acts of violence apparently perpetrated by the Wagner group", points out the report. Among them, 14 "seem to show the execution of Yevgeny Nuzhin" former Russian mercenary recruited by Wagner before deciding to support Ukraine, and to be killed in October 2022. We see, on several videos, the man under the threatens from a Wagner soldier, brandishing a mace to his head, before the camera turns off.

Among the videos identified by NewsGuard, 160 directly support the paramilitary group by glorifying its acts of violence, and around 500 videos advocate "violence against Ukrainians, some inciting in particular to kill Ukrainians because they are Nazis". Beyond posting images, five TikTok accounts have also been identified by NewsGuard as redirecting "users to sites where Wagner regularly posts recruitment ads", such as Russian social network VKontakte.

The content identified "has been viewed more than a billion times". They have particularly attracted the attention of English-speaking users thanks to the hashtags

But videos of another brutal execution by the Wagner Group in 2017 in Syria, again using the group's symbolic metal mace, are also plentiful on the platform, according to the report. A dozen of them are used to "incite violence against Ukrainians", "suggesting that Ukrainian soldiers should be executed in the same way". The images of this execution have been broadcast so much on the platform that they are now the subject of a "meme", and about thirty young Russian men imitate on their TikTok profile photo the pose of the executioner of the video, wearing the same clothes, reports NewsGuard.

The Tiktok platform reiterated to the NewsGuard group that the "Community Guidelines make it clear that we do not allow our platform to be used to threaten or incite violence, or to share attacks or insults based on nationality or nationality. 'other protected characteristics'. The American company specifies that "TikTok deleted" ten of the execution videos of Evgueni Prigojine while it was carrying out its analysis. But NewsGuard found that a video of the execution had been viewed at least 900,000 times before TikTok took it down."

If the platform promises to take "measures with regard to content that violates this policy", the problem also lies for NewsGuard in the very construction of the social network, in particular the operation of the search bar which thanks to the algorithm " pushes users towards violent content". "When an analyst typed the term 'Wagner' into TikTok's search bar, it suggested searching for 'Wagner execution' and 'Wagner mass'," the report said.

TikTok was pinned on Wednesday December 29 by Arcom, the French public authority for the regulation of audiovisual and digital communication, for its particularly poor performance in terms of controlling disinformation.