Over the course of two days, TikTok recommended at least 30 false videos related to Ukraine to experts from the Institute of Mass Information (IMI). Among them were fakes about a “Western conspiracy”, the “inevitable victory of Russia”, as well as videos aimed at discrediting the Ukrainian authorities and the Defense Forces. Some of this content was created by former Ukrainian politicians known for their pro-Russian stance. Such videos are often disguised as analysis, using clickbait headlines and emotional manipulation, spreading panic-driven messages and creating an illusion of the state’s helplessness.

As part of the study, researchers analyzed videos that TikTok’s algorithms suggested to Ukrainian users on September 9–10, 2025, under the most popular hashtags related to Ukraine and news about it. In total, selections under the tags “Ukraine”, “Ukraine news”, “Ukraine news today”, and similar ones in Russian were reviewed. In each case, the platform offered around 145 videos, and the content of these selections was almost identical.

The researchers identified 30 videos containing disinformation: 17 were classified as fakes and 13 as manipulations. This points to a systematic combination of outright lies with half-truths presented as forecasts or “expert” assessments. In manipulative videos, bloggers and pseudo-experts promoted narratives about a “Western conspiracy”, the “betrayal of the Ukrainian authorities”, or the “inevitable defeat of Ukraine”, often using the format of personal opinion, emotional generalizations, or quotes taken out of context.

Among the circulating fakes were videos about the alleged deaths of Ukrainian politicians, the supposed “division of Ukraine” between Russia and its allies, the absence of electricity and heating, as well as fabricated news created using artificial intelligence. Such videos use edited footage, synthesized voices, clickbait captions, and conspiracy theories.

IMI experts note that TikTok has become a platform where disinformation about Russia’s war against Ukraine is actively spread. The combination of the platform’s technological simplicity with emotional messaging makes these videos particularly dangerous, as a significant share of users perceive TikTok primarily as an entertainment resource and do not expect manipulative or propagandistic content there.

The claim that COVID-19 vaccination in Japan led to a sharp rise in mortality is not true. A widely circulated post alleged that vaccines were supposedly the cause of an “explosion of deaths”. In reality, the cited study merely describes an increase in excess mortality in Japan in certain years and does not establish any causal link between vaccination and this rise. The authors of the scientific paper explicitly state that vaccines cannot explain the increase in deaths. The manipulation was exposed by fact-checkers at Factcheck.bg.

An article titled “COVID vaccinations in Japan lead to a spike in mortality” was published by the outlet Kritichno.bg on August 28, 2025. It concluded that only 10% of deaths were linked to the coronavirus itself, while the rest were allegedly caused by vaccines.

However, the study mentioned in the article, published in BMJ Public Health in April 2024, reached entirely different conclusions. It analyzed excess mortality in Japan from 2020 to 2023 compared with the period from 2015 to 2019. Researchers recorded a decline in mortality in 2020, an increase in 2021 with a peak in 2022, followed by a decrease again in 2023. Overall, more than 219,000 excess deaths were recorded during the period.

The lead author of the study, University of Tokyo researcher Hanan Devanathan, emphasized that their research does not in any way prove a link between vaccines and mortality. It merely shows that mortality rates in the country did increase during the pandemic, due in particular to undiagnosed COVID-19 cases, waves of infection, demographic factors, and a rise in chronic diseases.

A similar view is shared by Paul Hunter, Professor of Medicine at the University of East Anglia. He noted that mortality peaks coincided with waves of COVID-19 rather than with vaccination campaigns. Most deaths in 2022–2023 occurred among vaccinated individuals simply because the majority of the population had been vaccinated by that time. At the same time, the risk of dying from COVID-19 among vaccinated people was significantly lower than among the unvaccinated.

Therefore, claims of an “explosion in mortality” caused by COVID-19 vaccines in Japan are a blatant manipulation that is not supported by any scientific evidence.