I'm not saying that they didn't just make up the article, but how do we know?
How do we know their bots didn't have bugs in them that pushed the results in favor of the tone of the article?
You don't need the bots source code to reproduce the experiment, just as you wouldn't ask to borrow/inspect a biochemist's beakers to reproduce their experiment.You simply follow the same steps they did and see if you observe the same results.
Bots may be prejudice to the war content in terms of how they watch videos and how they scroll through them, and as such changing recommendation algorithm, but the original reporting is about censorship of war related content. Which doesn't require that much of a proof, it is officially confirmed by TikTok even in the statement at the end of a submitted report - it doesn't show newly uploaded content in rus region.
[1] https://www.pling.com/p/1515346/ [2] https://github.com/tigr1234566/TikTokMod
Russia can't upload new things at all. There is nothing about the show from Russians to show.
Russia's are also not being shown new Ukraine videos. This is as designed as mentioned and as you know due to technical-implemnted regional bubbles.
What were you saying in your last two sentences?
> How do we know their bots didn't have bugs in them that pushed the results in favor of the tone of the article?
> how they watch videos and how they scroll through them, and as such changing recommendation algorithm