When I spoke with Benjamin Strick, the director of investigations for CIR, about his team’s monitoring of Russian troop movements in January and February, he said that “80 to 90 percent” of the videos they were able to document and verify were originally posted to TikTok by civilians. (Videos are laid out geographically, dated, sorted into content categories, and annotated with available details, as well as a “violence level.”) But most of their footage comes from TikTok. So, maybe, yes.įor months, researchers at the U.K.-based Centre for Information Resilience have been sourcing and verifying video from various social platforms, including Twitter and Instagram, and then aggregating clips into an easily navigable map of the ongoing conflict. Let’s start in practical terms: Are people watching and documenting this war through TikTok more so than they are watching and documenting it otherwise? TikTok has 130 million users in the United States, and supposedly 1 billion globally according to The New York Times, the volume of war content on TikTok “ far outweighs” what can be found on Instagram, where videos about the war are also netting significantly fewer views. If history plans to call this “the TikTok War,” it should have a compelling case for why. This is sort of tasteless, but also, because we live in a time during which media formats are iterating faster and faster, a little arbitrary. Wars are named after platforms, whether or not the platforms in question really determined how people thought about that war, or experienced it, or documented it, or fought it. In this way, global events with stark differences in meaning and costs of life are understood as a collection of online incidents. In 2013, The Daily Dot referred to the Syrian civil war as the “the first full-blown conflict presented to the world by YouTube and LiveLeak.” In 2016, Time announced the “ first Facebook war,” referring to a livestream of Iraqi and Kurdish forces fighting to oust the Islamic State from Mosul, in northern Iraq, while The Atlantic quoted a former State Department staffer’s claim that, in making use of Instagram and Twitter, ISIS had become “the first terrorist group to hold both physical and digital territory.” In 2012, Israel and Hamas were said to have engaged in the first war of tweets. The internet incentivizes quickly assembled narratives-ideas you can prove with a fistful of links-and each new war of the internet age has thus been dutifully described as the first of its kind, the first to be associated with the latest trend in digital media. military blocked troops from accessing YouTube on military computers. MTV turned some of this footage into a 2006 documentary titled Iraq Uploaded then, the following spring, the U.S. It was also called “the YouTube war,” in which, as one journalism professor put it, soldiers made “personal and at times shockingly brutal” homemade videos of gunfights, suicide bombings, and other violence, many set to rap or metal music. (The network famously pulled off a “coup” by successfully broadcasting live from Baghdad.) Twelve years later, the American invasion of Iraq was “ supposed to be CNN’s war” again, but instead became the Fox News war. The first war in Iraq, in 1991, was the first cable-news war, or the first CNN war. The history of war is also a history of media, and popular memory associates specific wars with different media formats. That same week, all kinds of publications started referring to the invasion as “the first TikTok war” New York Magazine coined the portmanteau “WarTok.” TikTok is a new global platform, and smartphone saturation is new in Ukraine, so perhaps it’s a reasonable claim. “This is the first war that will be covered on TikTok by super-empowered individuals armed only with smartphones,” the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote in February. Have you been watching the war in Ukraine via TikTok? Supposedly, everyone has been.
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