I'm not sure about this particular case, and absolutely no question that the specific interest in this case probably has very little to do with concern about democracy and a lot with power struggles in that new cold war we're in.
(Gonna agree with it being a soft coup if they limit the new election to only pro-western parties. So far, it's "only" the repeat of an election)
But, having said that, there really is a lot of pro-russian propaganda on TikTok and the way the algorithm selects it can't always be explained with user preferences.
An Austrian newspaper recently posted results of an experiment they did themselves: They added a bunch of brand new accounts, pretending to be teenagers. The given interests were diverse, but all of them unpolitical and typical kids stuff.
Nevertheless, after a short habituation period of benign posts, the feeds of all but one of the accounts quickly shifted from typical teenager stuff to "political" content, mostly hard right-wing, islamist and pro-russian clips. All of that without any of the users ever having given any indication that they were interested in political posts, let alone pro-russian ones.
Medium hot take: this is why closed-source social media post promotion algorithms should be banned. We should not let a foreign private company with government links influence society in a hidden way like that.
(Gonna agree with it being a soft coup if they limit the new election to only pro-western parties. So far, it's "only" the repeat of an election)
But, having said that, there really is a lot of pro-russian propaganda on TikTok and the way the algorithm selects it can't always be explained with user preferences.
An Austrian newspaper recently posted results of an experiment they did themselves: They added a bunch of brand new accounts, pretending to be teenagers. The given interests were diverse, but all of them unpolitical and typical kids stuff.
Nevertheless, after a short habituation period of benign posts, the feeds of all but one of the accounts quickly shifted from typical teenager stuff to "political" content, mostly hard right-wing, islamist and pro-russian clips. All of that without any of the users ever having given any indication that they were interested in political posts, let alone pro-russian ones.
The report is here (in German) : https://dietagespresse.com/selbstversuch-so-radikalisiert-ti...
The newspaper usually posts satire, but this article was about a real self-experiment.