The information war on the Russian invasion of Ukraine is raging on social networks.

As the magazine “Vice” explains, the Russian government has apparently given various Russian influencers on the TikTok platform precise instructions for propaganda contributions – for a fee.

Typically, influencers who have a large following on social media are in demand by companies to promote products.

Now they are interesting as propagandists in the Ukraine war.

As “Vice” reports, at the beginning of the invasion, various pro-Russian campaigns were coordinated via a secret channel on the short message service Telegram.

Influencers, often people with more than a million followers, were given detailed instructions for the paid posts: what statements to make and which hashtags to use, where to record videos and when to post them.

The willing spreaders of Kremlin propaganda should name a price for their participation in the campaign.

According to an anonymous TikToker, between 2,000 and 20,000 rubles are said to have flowed,

A photographer notices something

Russian photographer Christina Magonova became aware of one of these campaigns.

She posts split-screen videos of a dozen influencers using the same wording to spread Putin's fake news about an alleged "genocide" committed by Ukrainians against the population of Donbass.

As is well known, Putin used this lie and the talk of “denazification” to justify the invasion.

Magonova brackets her post with the question: "What is the difference between Russians and Ukrainians on social networks?

Ukrainians don't have to be paid for patriotism.” Other TikTokers are also critical of the influencers who “sell themselves for a loaf of bread”;

Observers found it amateurish to have the TikToker recite identical texts.

"Vice" is unable to determine the scope and success of the Russian propaganda campaign on Tiktok - not least because TikTok does not allow precise insights into what is happening on the platform.

Meanwhile, the Media Matters for America association identified 186 Russian influencer accounts that were part of the propaganda campaign.

The admin of the now-deleted Telegram channel, who posed as a journalist to Vice, also reportedly published step-by-step instructions on how to bypass TikTok's ban on new uploads from Russian accounts.

No more new uploads on TikTok

The video platform of the Chinese ByteDance group issued this ban on March 6th.

The day before, Putin had signed his “fake news” law, under which information about Russian troops that the Kremlin deems “fake” could be punished with prison terms of up to fifteen years.

The platform, which appears to be trying to minimize risk with this ban in a market with almost 55 million users, had previously shown itself to be overwhelmed when it came to dealing with images and articles on the war in Ukraine.

TikTok has enjoyed great success over the past five years (FAZ, March 7).

Here you can easily upload one to three minute videos and add soundtracks and comments.

Political content was marginal, but now the hashtag #Ukrainewar has more than eight hundred million views.

Instead of dance videos and other entertaining mini films, images of the war are now in demand.

Many of these videos, notes the New Yorker magazine, are framed entirely in the TikTok aesthetic – contextless, shaky images from the contested territories underscored with pop music catchy tunes;

young people documenting their shelter in the style of a popular TikTok format for displaying their own homes.

TikTok was not previously perceived as a news app, says information researcher Joan Donovan from Harvard University in the Wall Street Journal, but many people use it to stay informed.

The war pictures here are of course both documentation and popularity competition.

"War is content," notes the "New Yorker" with regard to the eye-catching value of the videos, which is rewarded by the algorithms of the social networks.

Given the flood of images, authentication and contextualization is almost impossible - and for users it may not be a decisive criterion.

Many users of the platform probably noticed that the thirteen Ukrainian soldiers on an island in the Black Sea, who at the beginning of the Russian attack defied the surrender demands of a Russian warship with coarse words, did not perish, as reported on TikTok, but according to Ukrainian information were taken prisoner just as little as the fact

that a supposedly Russian plane shooting down a fighter pilot comes from a video game.

Some images are underlaid with false soundtracks - such as the explosion in the port of Beirut.

This does not change the immediacy of the impression.

"While social media is an imperfect chronicler of war, at times it may be the most reliable source we have," says the New Yorker.

The American government does not want to leave this arena to the Kremlin.

At the end of last week, President Joe Biden invited around thirty American TikTok influencers to a forty-five-minute zoom briefing by his press secretary Jen Psaki and his security advisor Matt Miller - a kind of private press conference for the information multipliers of "Generation Z".

Their reach among young people makes them a political factor in information warfare.

The Kremlin has recognized this, however, as you can see in the overview by Christina Magonova, the influencers that have been bought also act exactly like the speaking puppets that they are.