TikTok said Monday it had removed accounts belonging to Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik for engaging in what TikTok called “covert influence operations.”
The social video app said in a statement on its website that it removed accounts associated with TV-Novosti and Rossiya Segodnya, the parent organizations of the RT television network and the Russian news agency Sputnik. TikTok said the accounts had violated its community guidelines, in particular its ban on deceptive behavior.
The associated accounts are now permanently banned, a TikTok spokesperson said in an email to NBC News.
The suspensions follow the Biden administration’s accusations this month that RT acts as an arm of Moscow’s spy agencies. Social media rivals Meta and YouTube have announced similar suspensions of Russian state media accounts, although other tech companies such as X have left up RT and Sputnik accounts.
TikTok said that, even before Monday, it had restricted the visibility of the accounts in the E.U. and U.K., and that it had already ruled their content ineligible for TikTok’s “For You” feed because they were state-affiliated media.
Representatives for RT and Sputnik did not immediately respond to requests for comment. RT and Sputnik both published reports over the weekend saying that some of their accounts had been deleted without explanation.
“TikTok users and our 86,000 subscribers are no longer allowed to know the truth about most urgent geopolitical issues and laugh at Western politicians’ gaffes in Sputnik International videos,” Sputnik said in a post on X on Saturday.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said this month that he believed Russian outlets such as RT had moved beyond working as media outlets and had turned into covert intelligence operations. Federal prosecutors recently charged two RT employees with running a $10 million project to boost Russia-aligned talking points while disguising the source of the money.
RT’s Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan has called the outlet a “normal journalist organization” and vowed to continue its work in the U.S.
“They close entry to us, and we will go through the window, close the window and we will go through the vents and we will see what holes there are in the organism of the United States of America,” she said on RT this month, according to Reuters.
TikTok said separately Monday that it removed five covert influence operations in August. One of the networks had 3.8 million followers across eight accounts and targeted discourse about Russia, according to TikTok. Two of the five networks targeted political discourse in Mexico, the app said.
