More than 12 million Ukrainian adults use TikTok. In recent months, the platform has become a major channel for fake videos, while its recommendation algorithms can propel them to thousands of viewers before they can be distinguished from the real thing. There is no foolproof way to stop such campaigns. TikTok is therefore no longer just a source of entertainment and amusing clips for Ukrainians. It is increasingly a vehicle for disinformation—and a potentially dangerous battleground in the information war.
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Let’s imagine a typical morning for a Ukrainian TikTok user. Open the app and, by default, you land on the “For You” feed. What appears there is known only to TikTok’s algorithms. Among the recommended clips is a short video of an elderly woman, her voice trembling as she urges viewers: “Report draft dodgers before you yourselves are taken away.” A few music videos and comic clips later, you might find yourself watching a supposed “soldier from the 46th Separate Airmobile Brigade” railing against the command’s “criminal decisions”. Scroll further, and there is a clip in which Ukrainian fighters allegedly threaten foreign workers and burn foreign flags, or a video from Sumy describing the city’s utility crisis.
All these videos are generated by artificial intelligence. They are presented to users as genuine footage, but in reality they are deepfakes—some of the many identified by Ukrainian experts.
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In recent months, this has become too systematic. As early as the beginning of 2026, the Centre for Countering Disinformation warned that Russia had “streamlined the production of such fakes”. Russian actors are using AI to create and distribute videos depicting mass casualties and losses among Ukraine’s armed forces, as well as alleged “atrocities committed by the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Donbas”.
At the same time, such campaigns are targeting Ukrainians abroad. On the Polish-language TikTok, false stories have circulated about Ukrainians failing to pay their fuel bills, planned drone attacks on Poland and anti-Ukrainian messages appearing in taxis. Such videos—and the narratives behind them—further strain Ukraine’s already difficult relations with some of its allies.
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There is another danger in this stream of fake or emotionally charged TikTok “junk”: pro-Russian Telegram channels, Russian media and anonymous social-media pages often pick it up and recycle it. They then feed it back into the Ukrainian information space as “proof” that the event really happened. The AI-generated fake thus acquires an added veneer of legitimacy and begins circulating beyond TikTok.
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Why TikTok is the propagandists’ ideal weapon
To understand how a platform better known for dance videos and teenage challenges has become a true battleground for information warfare, it is worth looking beyond the content itself—what it is about, how it is made and how it is presented—to the architecture of media consumption that TikTok imposes on its users.
A key factor in understanding the risks of TikTok is that it is primarily a video platform, rather than a text-based one. Short clips can create a sense of presence and eyewitness testimony, even when the scene has been staged or generated by AI. A text-based fake is more likely to prompt questions about its authorship: the reader may reasonably wonder, “Who wrote this?”
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A video, by contrast, creates the illusion of firsthand testimony. If a person, place or event is visible on screen, viewers are more likely to take what they see as proof that it actually happened.
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