Ticking bomb for democracy: accounts on TikTok promote anti-system parties before elections
Hundreds of fake accounts on the social network TikTok, which evidently aim to influence parliamentary elections in the country, have been highlighted in recent days by the IT expert initiative Center for Online Risk Research. These accounts, for example, spread pro-Russian content aimed against the EU or NATO, defend the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and promote parties such as the SPD and Enough!.
The spokesperson for the Czech Telecommunication Office, Tereza Meravá, confirmed that the office is dealing with fake accounts that are opposed to the EU, NATO or Ukraine, and aim to influence elections in the Czech Republic. In this context, she mentions that these are likely to be robotic accounts, which is evidenced, among other things, by their failure to manage Czech diacritics, randomly switching to other languages, or mistakenly dealing with a situation in Africa instead of in the Czech Republic.
Hundreds of TikTok Accounts
The IT professionals' initiative Center for Online Risk Research has come across about three hundred interconnected accounts that artificially increase their reach to millions of views per week by mutual sharing and commenting. TikTok is used by approximately two million people in our country.
"One of the key signals for content recommendation is the length of watch time and the number of interactions. This principle can be easily manipulated,"
Vendula Prokůpková from the initiative stated for Czech News Agency.
Roman Máca, a security analyst at the Institute for Politics and Society, also warned of the risks associated with such a threat.
"People are increasingly obtaining information from social networks, and if we don't want our view of the world to be shaped by some computer from St. Petersburg, we should certainly be vigilant,"
The analyst said in an interview for Czech Radio.
Political scientist Eva Klusová also confirms Mácová's words.
"There is a huge amount of Russian propaganda on TikTok, which wants to influence the election result. The Russians have been working on this for a long time and they are very good at it. They have been supporting anti-system parties for a long time, for example,"
she explained to the Seznam Zprávy portal and added that the real threat is the radicalization of part of society, especially teenagers. TikTok is not a moderated platform, which she says means a "ticking bomb for democracy." However, because many of these people are not yet 18, therefore do not have voting rights, the impact of the campaign may not be as significant as Russia probably expects.
Most of the TikTok accounts that the initiative uncovered spread content supporting selected candidates from the Enough!, SPD, PRO, SPRRSČ Miroslav Sládek and other parties. At the same time, however, the accounts are not tied to a single political party - they support multiple anti-system parties at once.
Digital helps create fake posts
The Czech Telecommunication Office warns that election campaigns, including political advertising, are increasingly moving to the online space. Therefore, if anyone suspects that there are violations of the terms of operation of the market for digital services, including system failures of online platforms, which could affect the fairness of the election process, they can submit a report to the office.
Artificial intelligence is very advanced in automatic content generation. Because of this, the average person sometimes doesn't even realize that there could be various errors. Internet users often don't even recognize that it's an edited post. Modern technologies for creating fake news, such as deep fakes or voice impersonations, are also relatively cheap and massive.
Russia Wants to Control the Online Space
Russia's efforts to control the digital space have been underway for quite some time. The domestic news and editorial website Voxpot, in cooperation with the association Druit, found out last summer that disinformation servers offered to Czechs produce a daily number of articles exceeding the largest Czech media houses. The production of disinformation websites has been reaching with approximately four thousand articles monthly the highest numbers in history and it's the highest since the beginning of Russian invasion into Ukraine in 2022.
The spread of such materials is officially due to anti-Russian sanctions in the European Union since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Financial Analytical Office of the Ministry of Finance - the main authority for enforcing sanctions - confirmed to Voxpot that publishers face a fine of up to 50 million crowns or a sentence of up to eight years in prison for publications. Some of these disinformation websites, Voxpot claims, do it covertly directly for Russian money or are funded through entities that are close to this country.
The aim of these reports is not to offer an alternative perspective on current topics. It is primarily an effort to arouse distrust in democratic institutions, Western integration projects, and political and military leaders through the use of false or manipulated reports. With long-term exposure to disinformation and manipulation, we also lose the ability to distinguish between reality and fiction. Our reasoning in such cases is based on nonsensical assumptions.
Sources: CTK, Seznam News, Czech Radio, Voxpot
