In the weeks following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin criminalized anything it considered “false information” about state entities or the war in Ukraine. In response, on March 6, TikTok suspended livestreaming and new content on the app for Russia-based users. But a new report reveals that certain Russia-based accounts continue to upload videos to the platform, which in turn serves them to Russian users. Call it “shadow-promotion.”
That’s the term used by Salvatore Romano, head of research at the Mozilla-funded digital rights nonprofit Tracking Exposed, which released the report today. Unlike shadow-banning, where creators post content that a platform’s algorithms or content moderation suppress, TikTok’s shadow-promotion keeps videos off of the creators’ accounts, but promotes those videos to the For You Pages (FYPs) of other users. “This is something…
