TikTok announced on Monday that it has banned accounts from Sputnik and RT, two Russian official media organizations, for participating in “covert influence operations.”
The social video app announced on its website that it had deleted accounts connected to the Russian news outlet Sputnik and the parent companies of the RT television network, TV-Novosti and Rossiya Segodnya. The accounts, according to TikTok, had broken its community standards, especially the one against misleading behavior.
The linked accounts have been permanently blocked, according to an email from a TikTok representative.
This month, the Biden administration charged that RT served as a front for Moscow’s espionage services. While some digital firms, like X, have left RT and Sputnik accounts up, competitor social networking platforms Meta and YouTube have announced similar bans of Russian official media accounts.
Before Monday, according to TikTok, the accounts in the United Kingdom and the European Union had their visibility restricted, and their material had already been deemed unfit for TikTok’s “For You” stream.
Requests for response from RT and Sputnik representatives were not immediately answered. Over the weekend, RT and Sputnik both released reports claiming that some of their accounts had been removed without cause.
Sputnik stated on X on Saturday that “TikTok users and our 86,000 subscribers are no longer allowed to know the truth about the most pressing geopolitical issues and laugh at the mistakes made by Western politicians in Sputnik International videos.”
This month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed his opinion that Russian media outlets, including RT, had evolved from being mere media organizations to secret intelligence operations. Two RT staff members were accused by US prosecutors of overseeing a $10 million scheme to support talking points that support Russia while hiding the funding source.
Chief editor Margarita Simonyan of RT has described the company as a “regular journalistic organization” and promised to keep it operating in the United States.
She remarked this month on RT, as reported by Reuters: “They close entry to us, and we will go through the window; close the window, and we will go through the vents, and we will see what holes there are in the organism of the United States of America.”
Separately on Monday, TikTok announced that it had eliminated five covert influence campaigns in August. According to TikTok, one network had eight accounts with 3.8 million followers that focused on talk concerning Russia. It stated that two of the five networks focused on Mexican political discourse.
