TikTok says it disrupted 15 influence operations this year — including one from China

TikTok on Thursday released its first report detailing efforts to remove “covert influence operations” from its platform, noting 15 such campaigns including one from China that targeted people in the U.S. with the intent to promote “Chinese policy and culture.”

The report said the campaign was relatively small — 16 accounts with 110,161 followers — and operated from China.

“The individuals behind this network created inauthentic accounts in order to artificially amplify positive narratives of China, including support for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) policy decisions and strategic objectives, as well as general promotion of Chinese culture,” TikTok said in the report. “This network utilized accounts impersonating high-profile US creators and celebrities in an attempt to build an audience.”

A separate network of 65 fake accounts worked together to amplify pro-Iranian narratives to audiences in the U.S. and the U.K. before TikTok took down the network in February, according to the company. TikTok said the network had an audience of 116,612 followers.

The pro-Iranian accounts “initially posted content associated with travel and tourism in order to build an audience, before switching to political topics,” including the war between Hamas and Israel, TikTok said.

TikTok found larger networks aiming to influence a wide variety of political discourses including those in Bangladesh, Venezuela, Indonesia, Ecuador, Serbia, Germany and Guatemala. It also posted details about how it defines and looks for “covert influence operations.”

Few other social media platforms put out similar reports on efforts to break up influence campaigns. Facebook-owner Meta puts out a quarterly “Adversarial Threat Report.”

TikTok’s report adds to growing concerns about the use of social media to manipulate the upcoming U.S. election as well as elections scheduled to take place around the world. TikTok has also been the subject of intense scrutiny over its Chinese ownership and whether China’s government could use it to further its political interests.

President Joe Biden last month signed a bill that could lead to a nationwide ban on TikTok in 2025 if the app’s owner, the Beijing-based company ByteDance, doesn’t sell it first. TikTok and its users have sued to block the law, citing the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.

Meta has warned that China has become one of the most aggressive actors in terms of efforts to sway U.S. public opinion through fake accounts on social media.

Chinese officials have said they are unaware of such campaigns and that China is itself a victim of disinformation.

"I’m not aware of the specifics you mentioned," Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington told NBC News when asked about the report.

"As principle, China has always required Chinese citizens to abide by laws and regulations including the the regulations of Internet platforms," he added.

In March, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said: “The problem of the U.S. is that while never finding evidence of TikTok threatening its national security, the U.S. resorts to state power and abuses national security as the reason to suppress this company.”

TikTok’s report did not allege that China’s government was behind the influence operation.

Concern that foreign governments could use social media to quietly push propaganda in other countries — and meddle in their elections — first exploded in 2017, when security researchers at Facebook disclosed that Russia-based operatives had tried to sow division in the U.S. with fake accounts during the 2016 presidential election.

In response, tech companies began investing more in capabilities to detect and remove other secret networks of fake accounts.

TikTok’s report does not include any networks based in Russia, but it did find a sizable effort based in Ukraine targeting Russia’s war there. The company says it found 52 accounts with more than 2.6 million followers that “created inauthentic accounts and posted content in Ukrainian at scale in order to artificially amplify pro-Ukrainian narratives and generate off-platform traffic, thereby attempting to manipulate discourse about the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.”

“The network was observed to be using ‘clickbait’ tactics, using grabbing sticker text without showing the full details of the video in order to create engagement and attention,” the report added.

TikTok said that even after it removes a network of fake accounts, the people behind the network often try to re-establish a presence, prompting TikTok to remove sometimes thousands of inauthentic accounts a month.

TikTok has been the subject of some research that has found some political narratives and topics outperform others. A report in December from researchers at Rutgers University alleged that TikTok likely promoted and demoted certain topics based on the foreign policy stances of the Chinese government — a conclusion that TikTok said was baseless.

Some of TikTok’s U.S. critics have also claimed that the platform is being used to distort young people’s political perspectives, including on the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, although experts say there are likely many factors involved with shifting public sentiments.