Summary / TL;DR
Against the backdrop of the parliamentary elections in Moldova (September 28, 2025), political videos in Russian are actively distributed on TikTok, uploaded mainly from accounts associated with Belarus. Our cross-section of the Cyrillic hashtags #Moldova and #Kishinev for July 10 – September 8, 2025 shows that dozens of channels are publishing excerpts of Russian TV content and other politicized videos, gaining hundreds of thousands and millions of views. This looks like a practice of bypassing TikTok restrictions for users from the Russian Federation – by moving publications to “safe” accounts/locations.
In three weeks, on September 28, 2025, there will bepassparliamentary elections in the Republic of Moldova. These elections attract a lot of attention from Belarusian and Russian state propaganda. Our recent publication:Coordinated disinformation campaign to discredit parliamentary elections in Moldova.
One of the important tools of people involved in FIMI regarding Moldova is popular social media. Of course, one of the main places of this fight will be the social network TikTok. Our publications about campaigns in Tikok in neighboring countries of the region:
- How TikTok Affected the Polish Presidential Election Results
- Romanian presidential candidates battle on TikTok
Data and Methodology (slice 10.07–08.09.2025)
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Source of metrics:Exolyt – TikTok Social Intelligence Platform.
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Requests: Cyrillic hashtags #Moldova, additionally#Kishinev; filter by creators and country of upload, with a focus on accounts publishing from Belarus.
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The final corpus for filtered videos:337 videosfrom36unique channels; total28 704 273views; average engagement —0.04%(by platform metrics); “viral” (100K+) —69, “mega-viral” (1M+) —2.
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Top cases: clips of Russian TV uploaded from Belarus; notable accounts include:@maxim.0440 And @maxim0440.3. For one of them, the second largest group in the audience assessment is subscribers from Moldova; for the other, the share is lower, but in TikTok, virality often does not directly correlate with the composition of subscribers.
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Additional cut by#Kishinevrevealed49videos for the same period with the highest audience share from Moldova.
While searching for possible insights into the course of the election campaign, we use the opportunity to analyze trends.
Let’s try to understand the Cyrillic hashtag better#Moldova.
The most impressive diagram is which hashtags were associated with the studied over the last two months:
We see quite a lot of Cyrillic hashtags related to political life in Moldova.
The largest overlaps are with the following hashtags:
Some seem quite suspicious:#gagauzia, #transnistria, #politics, #elections.
So which videos with the hashtag #moldova have collected more views during this period.
Scrolling through the feed, we saw that quite often there are videos that were uploaded from Belarus and collected hundreds of thousands and millions of views.
Of course, this interested us and we installed an additional filter for content creators:
We downloaded the data on these videos and it turned out to be 337 videos. After analyzing them using R scripts, we found out that:
Unique channels: 36
Total views: 28,704,273
Average engagement: 0.04%
Viral videos (100K+): 69
Mega-viral (1M+): 2
Channels that collected more views:
First, let’s look at the video that has the most views.
The most viral:
Firstly, these videos are a cut from a Russian TV channel. Secondly, this video was not aimed directly at a Moldovan audience, as follows from the transcribed content made by Exolyt:
Audience assessment made by the service:
A compilation of content from Russian television and videos uploaded from Belarus led to a search for possible reasons for this phenomenon.
Is TikTok Available in the Russian Federation in 2025?
TikTok has imposed restrictions for users in the Russian Federation since March 2025. Russian users can log in to their accounts, watch videos, leave comments, and write messages to each other. But some of the social network’s features are severely limited. For example, users from Russia cannot:
• broadcast;
• access new videos;
• watch videos created in other countries;
• upload their own clips.
In addition, you won’t be able to watch videos from a browser: if you try to open the official website from a Russian IP address, the videos won’t load — the user will only see a blank page. The creators’ rewards program, which allows you to monetize content, is also unavailable to Russians.
Russian users can use TikTok’s full capabilities:
• use a VPN or proxy server in the browser version — this way you can watch fresh videos from both your computer and your phone;
• install a modified application (for Android);
• change your region (for iPhone).
• connectforeign SIM card.
Source of reference information:https://web.archive.org/web/20250815091123/https://hi-tech.mail.ru/review/116899-tiktok-v-rossii/
The next point of our additional research was the composition of the audiences of the two leading accounts:https://www.tiktok.com/@maxim.0440 And https://www.tiktok.com/@maxim0440.3
The second largest group is the group of subscribers from Moldova.
Another channel:
Here below, but on TikTok, the virality of a video often does not depend on the composition of subscribers.
To find videos aimed at the Moldovan audience, we added another Cyrillic hashtag#Kishinev. There were 49 such videos for the period from July 10 to September 8, 2025:
As we can see, these videos also collected quite a large number of views. Let’s test our hypothesis by studying the audience composition:
The largest share of the audience turns out to be from Moldova.
Conclusions
Content: short, emotionally charged clips, often edited from TV reports, presented as “inconvenient truth”/“hidden information”.
Techniques: highly recognizable audio samples, clicks on trending sounds, aggressive subtitles/labels (“lies”, “sensation”), network hashtags for interregional delivery.
Targeting: the main delivery is to Russian-speaking audiences in the region; however, the share of the Moldovan audience in a number of videos/accounts is significant.
What does this mean for Moldova (before September 28, 2025)
TikTok has a steady flow of political content in Russian, which potentially influences the perception of the legitimacy of elections and foreign policy.
Geostrategic bridge: Belarus acts as an infrastructure platform for uploading/rebroadcasting videos, which reduces the effectiveness of regional restrictions.
FIMI (Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference) risk: systemic, cross-border delivery of narratives with signs of coordination.
TikTok remains a key channel for reaching the “underpoliticized” youth audience of Moldova. Bypassing Russian restrictions through Belarusian accounts is not an isolated case, but a repeating pattern. The most successful videos are “repacks” of TV stories adapted to the TikTok format (dynamic editing, subtitles, trendy sounds). Engagement is low on average (0.04%), but the “long tail” and individual “mega-viral” videos provide millions of views, sufficient to form a “background” narrative. A set of FIMI features is present: interregional coordination, unification of messages, repetition of semantics/hashtags, use of proxy locations.
