TikTok has said that it has terminated accounts that were affiliated with Russian official media due to the fact that they were “engaging in covert influence operations.”
In the run-up to the presidential election in the United States, which will take place in November, this is part of the site’s attempts to prevent the spread of misinformation.
Both the accounts belonging to the media group Rossiya Segodnya, which is the owner of the RIA Novosti and Sputnik news services, as well as those belonging to TV-Novosti, which is the parent body of the RT news channel, have been compromised.
TikTok stated that the accounts had been prohibited in the United Kingdom and the European Union in the past and that their content across the globe was categorised as state-controlled media.
On the other hand, it is now generally accepted that they have been permanently prohibited.
The company that owns Instagram and Facebook, Meta, blocked Rossiya Segodnya, RT, and other websites for “foreign interference activity.” This move comes after Meta made a similar decision the previous week.
RT that the United States company was “censoring information flow to the rest of the world.” RT had lost its broadcast licence in the United Kingdom in March of 2022.
Meta was accused of “discrediting itself” by the Kremlin for its decision to prohibit the networks.
There has not yet been any response to the news that TikTok broke on Monday.
After the United States filed charges against two employees of RT this month, the restrictions were implemented. The allegations indicate that the employees attempted to recruit an American company to publish internet content with the intention of influencing the election.
Additionally, in July, the United States Department of Justice shut down roughly one thousand social media bot accounts, which it claimed were created with the intention of spreading disinformation about Russia.
A Senate committee came to the conclusion that there was a sophisticated campaign to assist in the election of Donald Trump, which led to the infamous accusation that the Russian state interfered in the presidential election that took place in 2016.
There is a new rule in the United States that threatens to prohibit TikTok because of fears that it may share data with the Chinese government. This has ironically put TikTok in a precarious position in the United States.