Ukraine becomes world’s first TikTok War

Russia’s invasion of Uraine is not the first social media war—but it is the first to play out on TikTok, as reported by WIRED. Images of unspeakable horrors supplanting the banality of status updates and selfies is nothing new. But the current conflict is a very different kind of social media war, fueled by TikTok’s transformative effect on the old norms of tech. Its more established competitors fundamentally changed the nature of conflict, but TikTok has created a stream of war footage the likes of which we have never seen, from grandmothers saying goodbye to family to instructions on how to drive captured Russian tanks.

So much of TikTok’s success comes down to both how visual it is and how instant it is. From memes and dance crazes to the storming of the U.S. Capitol, it captures and clips the world with an immediacy other platforms can’t. As Russia prepared to invade Ukraine, it became a boon for open source investigators trying to track troop movements, and has provided immediate, quickfire footage of what’s happening as Ukrainians fight for their future.

TikTok’s rise is—and always has been—a result of how easy it is to use. Its in-app editing and filters make it easier than any other platform to capture and share the world around us. If Facebook is bloated, Instagram is curated, and YouTube requires a shedload of equipment and editing time, TikTok is quick and dirty—the kind of video platform that can shape perceptions of how a conflict is unfolding. And as anyone who’s browsed social media in the last week knows, what happens on TikTok rarely stays on TikTok.

“As an analyst of what’s happening in Ukraine at the moment, I’m getting 95 percent of my information from Twitter,” says Ed Arnold, research fellow in European security at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI). “Before that, 90 percent of your information would come from official sources, like intelligence sources.” But among the flurry of tweets, Arnold has noticed a strange trend: A significant chunk of the videos being shared are emblazoned with the TikTok watermark. “It’s odd,” he says.

But it makes sense. TikTok is ubiquitous, user-friendly, and a lot of younger people use it, says Arnold. As of July 2020, 28.5 million of Russia’s 144 million people used TikTok, according to WIRED’s internal data. (Data for Ukraine was not available.) “Out of all the social media, TikTok is the one that is most visual[ly engaging],” says Agnes Venema, a national security and intelligence academic at the University of Malta.

TikTok is a firehose of content. Getting specific content in front of eyeballs on the For You page is the job of TikTok’s algorithm. It’s the thing that can propel nobodies into superstardom overnight, and can also mean that shaky footage of the aftermath of a Russian missile attack can potentially be seen by millions of people within minutes of being uploaded.

As WIRED reports, TikTok’s algorithm feeds people videos it believes they are hungry to see. And there’s plenty of appetite for videos about war right now: In the eight days between February 20 and February 28, views on videos tagged with #ukraine jumped from 6.4 billion to 17.1 billion—a rate of 1.3 billion views a day, or 928,000 views a minute. (Content tagged #Украина, Ukraine in Cyrillic, is almost as popular, with 16.4 billion views as of February 28.)

But that immediacy and reach on and off TikTok comes at a price. Emotive videos can cause people to overlook whether or not information is legitimate. Couple that with a younger, sometimes less media-literate audience, and it’s a recipe for trouble. “Disinformation is really aimed at trying to elicit an emotional response,” says Venema, “It’s the stuff that gets you outraged, that gets you emotional, that tugs on the heartstrings. Combine those two, and that’s why there’s so much of it.” To combat this problem TikTok has partnered with independent fact-checking organizations to try and combat disinformation, but has struggled to slow the spread of fake or distorted news on its platform more than some of its more established social media competitors. The reason? Again, it comes down to TikTok’s design.

Research shows that fake new travels six times faster than legitimate information on social media—in large part because of its ability to trigger a strong emotional response. TikTok’s design, which throws users headlong into an immersive, endless stream of snappy content, is designed to monopolize attention. Even legitimate information can work by appealing to outrage—and there are few things more outrageous than what’s going on in Ukraine at present.

“It’s called collective sensemaking,” says Claudia Flores-Saviaga, who studies disinformation, crowdsourcing, and social computing at Northeastern University. “That is something very normal during crisis events like wars or natural disasters.” And with tools like duetting and stitching, which allow people to easily become creators themselves by responding to existing videos, TikTok encourages everyone to collectively make sense of what’s going on—or muddy the truth.

So far, pro-Ukrainian profiles have dominated the discourse on TikTok. However, videos of invading Russian forces causing destruction also plays into the hands of Putin, warns Flores-Saviaga. “Social media is definitely being weaponized,” she says. That includes dis- or misinformation, designed either to intimidate or to profit from the enormous appetite for war content. And it’s here that TikTok is struggling to keep pace.

TikTok has come under scrutiny for its inability to police content. US non-profit Media Matters for America has highlighted numerous instances of the app being abused to amplify false content. Sara Mosavi, a TikTok spokesperson, says the company continues to “monitor the situation with increased resources to respond to emerging trends and remove violative content, including harmful misinformation and promotion of violence,” but declines to give specific details.

Some Ukrainian TikTok users have made it a mission to share information and spread awareness with Western audiences. “I want people to understand this is not a joke, this is a serious situation that Ukrainians face,” Marta Vasyuta, 20, said in an interview with Reuters. One of Vasyuta’s TikTok videos showed what appeared to be a missile in the sky with the caption “Kyiv 4:23 am.” It had over 131,000 comments by Monday as users flooded the video to offer their prayers and express disbelief.

She’s watched on as TikTokers post live streams from Russian cities and speak out against Putin’s invasion. “Everyone knows the truth,” she says. “Now it’ll be really hard for the Russian government to continue lying. They’re saying these are Ukrainian soldiers bombing the cities in Ukraine. That they ‘just came to save us’. We don’t need to be saved. We need to be heard.”

“Never thought I would get WAR updates on TIKTOK,” commented one user.

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