Desperate to use the Russia-Ukraine conflict to cover for its past year of absolute failure, the White House collaborated with a group of 30 TikTok influencers, each of whom reach millions of Americans on daily basis with their video content.

According to Fox News, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was on the conference call with the influencers, and among other topics, claimed that Russia “hacked” the 2016 presidential election. 

The false claim, which Democrats used as a narrative to excuse Hillary Clinton’s embarrassing defeat to Donald Trump at the time, came up during a discussion involving the rampant disinformation being circulated by Russia as the country struggles to capture neighboring Ukraine.

Psaki was joined on the call by a top National Security Council (NSC) official.

Russia Russia Russia!

Over the past six years or so, Democrats have blamed Russia for nearly everything, especially anything Trump-related. Though claims of Russia’s hacking of the 2016 presidential election have been mostly debunked, that didn’t stop Psaki from pushing the narrative once again.

“The best antidote to disinformation is the truth. And one of the big steps we’ve taken, and made a decision to make, is declassify information over the course of the last several months,” Psaki told the influencers.

She added: “If you look back at 2014, and frankly even 2016, when Russia invaded Ukraine and then in 2016, when they, you know, of course, hacked our election here, we did not do that, we did not declassify information.”

Psaki’s statements came as she explained that relevant public information related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is being quickly declassified as a measure to prevent the spread of misinformation.

“So hopefully that has helped cut down the credibility of their disinformation. But it is still a daily struggle where we’re constantly trying to knock down things they are saying, accusations they are making that have no basis in fact at all,” the NSC official who joined Psaki on the call, said.

What was the call about?

Other than pushing debunked narratives, Psaki and other White House officials conducted the call with the TikTokers in order to “make sure you had the latest information from an authoritative source,” they told them, according to the New York Post.

This isn’t the first time that Biden’s White House has enlisted top social media influencers to push certain narratives. Last year, they made a similar move to push pro-COVID vaccine messaging across the app, as it’s where a majority of Gen Z users get their news.

Unsurprisingly, the idea of holding Ukraine briefings with TikTok stars was widely panned by Biden’s critics, and rightfully so.