Russian state-backed TikTok posts surge as U.S. election nears: report

TikTok accounts linked to the Russian state are targeting wedge issues ahead of the upcoming U.S. election, a new report is warning. Here's how.

Russian state-backed accounts on TikTok are posting far more, and reaching many more people, in the lead-up to the U.S. election, a new report finds.

And it says the exposure may impact voters’ willingness to “mobilize or take actions” that could help the target of false or hyperpartisan content, the report states.

“(The accounts) were focusing on things that could be quite potent or quite prominent wedge issues for young voters,” the report’s author Valerie Wirtschafter told Global News.

Those include the United State’s policies on Israel, immigration concerns (the report found Spanish posts had high engagement) and Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

Wirtschafter examined 70 Russian state-linked accounts. She determined they posted about twice as many times per day on average in 2024 so far than in 2023, rising to four or five times per day from two or three times.

And many more people are seeing the posts. Wirtschafter found engagements rose from three million per day on average in 2022 to 13 million per day in 2024. A small portion of the posts focus on wedge issues.

The report, from the Washington-based think tank Brookings Institution, outlines a contrast in how the Russian state-linked posts portrayed the two presidential candidates. The posts about Biden focused on his age and questioned whether he was fit for another term in office, whereas the posts about Trump looked at his humour, stance on NATO and limited-edition shoe line.

“It was very much one-dimensional in terms of the type of narrative,” Wirtschafter said, telling Global News the TikTok accounts also raised concerns about Biden’s handling of classified documents, while no post mentioned Trump’s handling of them.