The sound of disinformation: TikTok, computational propaganda, and the invasion of Ukraine

Summary

This paper argues that TikTok has become a significant vector for mis- and disinformation about Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and that the platform’s distinctive sonic affordances — reusable audio, sounds, and music — constitute an under-theorized layer of computational propaganda. Drawing on content from the first three months following the February 2022 invasion, Bösch and Divon show that the scale of war-related circulation on TikTok is enormous and that sound, alongside image and text, operates as a discrete mechanism through which misleading war narratives are conveyed and amplified.

Key Contributions

• Foregrounds sound as a previously neglected modality of disinformation, pushing platform studies beyond text- and image-centric frames.
• Provides an early empirical snapshot of TikTok’s role in the information environment around the Ukraine war.
• Extends the concept of computational propaganda to encompass TikTok-specific affordances, including the reuse and remixing of audio.

Methods

The authors analyze TikTok content posted during the first three months after Russia’s February 2022 invasion, examining videos circulating under war-related hashtags (notably Ukraine) and attending to engagement metrics such as view counts. Methodologically, sound is treated as a first-class analytical category alongside the visual and textual layers of the videos.

Findings

• Videos tagged Ukraine accumulated 36.9 billion views in three months, with individual videos reaching up to 88 million views — establishing TikTok as a major site of war-related information flow.
• Sound operates as a distinct audiovisual mechanism for disinformation: reusable audio tracks and sonic templates enable misleading narratives to propagate at scale through the platform’s remix and recommendation logics.
• TikTok’s affordances thus warrant analysis as platform-specific propaganda infrastructure, not merely as an extension of older social media dynamics.

Connections

This paper sits within emerging work on platform-specific information disorder and computational propaganda, sharing concerns with broader research on coordinated and viral influence operations such as Starbird2025-jj and DeVerna2025-dl. Its focus on war-related disinformation connects to studies of conflict-driven information environments like FitzGerald2025-nv, while its attention to TikTok’s distinctive affordances complements platform-comparative and recommender-focused work such as Gonzalez-Bailon2024-rq. The argument for sound as a propaganda modality is, on the evidence of the topic list, a relatively isolated intervention — most adjacent work remains text- or image-centric.