TIKTOK’S BOOM
The war in Ukraine is the first that will be covered on TikTok by individuals armed with smartphones. Sorry, Facebook, you’re last war’s social media
This was Google Maps as it had never been seen before. Instead of the usual cars, it showed Russian tanks blocking traffic on roads in the cities of Ukraine. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been called the first TikTok war. But it’s just as easily the first Google Maps war, or the first Starlink war, as both technologies are playing an as-yet unseen role.
Every conflict has been described as the first for something — very often in terms of the tech that goes on to define the successive era. Trench warfare and mustard gas in World War 1; monster tanks and air power in World War 2.
Innovations in radios for soldiers spurred on a new wireless generation, while the cryptography of Bletchley Park saw a huge leap in computing thanks to the genius of Alan Turing. Helicopters became mainstream in the Vietnam War — which was itself revolutionary for beaming footage back to anxious Americans, showing war in real time, for the first time.
By the time the Arab Spring arrived in 2010, smartphones and Facebook had become the tools for citizen reporters. Now, with Russia’s invasion, the technology upgrade cycle has produced an extraordinary combination of ways in which victims can communicate what is happening to them.
Nobody is more emblematic of this so-called TikTok war than Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose selfie videos from the front line have galvanised not only his nation but much of the world.
War has always been about ordinary people, but never before has it been possible for Josef Publik to share their experience of it so directly. The social media age has provided not only millions of pointless selfies and self-aggrandising “influencers”, but also a way for the victims of horrendous circumstances to tell their own stories.
“Welcome to World War Wired — the first war in a totally interconnected world,” writes foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman in The New York Times. “This will be the Cossacks meet the World Wide Web.”
He continues: “Our world is not going to be the same again because this war has no historical parallel. It is a raw, 18th-century-style land grab by a superpower — but in a 21st-century globalised world.
“This is the first war that will be covered on TikTok by super-empowered individuals armed only with smartphones, so acts of brutality will be documented and broadcast worldwide without any editors or filters.”
It’s an important point, given the role social media can play in accountability processes. Already in 2020, international NGO Human Rights Watch noted the increasing importance of photo and video posts on social media, both for judicial processes and for civil society’s attempts to document atrocities. In Ukraine, conflict monitors and open-source researchers are currently using social media posts to geolocate attacks on civilians, for example.
To put all this in perspective, in just the first 24 hours of the invasion, “we already [had] more information about what’s going on there than we would have [had] in a week during the Iraq war”, writes Daniel Johnson, a soldier and journalist who was with the US army in Iraq in 2016.
How information is shared and consumed has fundamentally changed. “What is coming out of Ukraine is simply impossible to produce on such a scale without citizens and soldiers throughout the country having easy access to cellphones, the internet and, by extension, social media apps. A large-scale modern war will be live-streamed, minute by minute, battle by battle, death by death, to the world,” Johnson writes on news site Slate.
And, he adds, it is video-sharing site TikTok that has “become a source for those who want to keep up with events ongoing in the country”.
Sorry, Facebook. Sorry, Instagram. Sorry, Twitter. You are the social media of yesterday’s wars.
It’s a development that has also allowed the other side, as it were, to reveal their own fears and experiences.
One text massage from a Russian soldier to his mother aptly captures the conscript’s perspective of the war: “We were told that they would welcome us, and they are falling under our armoured vehicles, throwing themselves under the wheels and not allowing us to pass. They call us fascists. Mama, this is so hard.”
On Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, Friedman writes: “The seven most dangerous words in journalism are: ‘The world will never be the same.’ In over four decades of reporting, I have rarely dared use that phrase.”
But now, he writes, the world is “wired together more intimately than ever before by telecommunications; satellites; trade; the internet; road, rail and air networks; financial markets; and supply chains. So, while the drama of war is playing out within the borders of Ukraine, the risks and repercussions of Putin’s invasion are being felt around the globe.”
Only in this world could the words of stubborn Ukrainian soldiers become the signifier of defiance, with their immortal retort: “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.”
Welcome, indeed, to World War Wired.
A large-scale modern war will be live-streamed, minute by minute, battle by battle, death by death, to the world
Daniel Johnson