Watching the World’s “First TikTok War”

One of the most striking images from the first days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a picture, taken by the photojournalist Tyler Hicks, depicting a dead soldier sprawled on the ground in front of a disabled tank, his body covered in a sheet of fresh snow. The photograph ran on the front page of the Times on February 26th. Its caption noted that both the soldier and the armored vehicle were Russian and that the photo was taken in Kharkiv, the city in northeastern Ukraine where some of the most intense fighting has been taking place. Another equally arresting document of the war’s beginnings is a TikTok video, posted on February 24th, showing phone-camera images and video clips of missiles falling over the city of Kyiv like fireworks. A line of text reads, “The capital of Ukraine at the moment.” The video is set, with breathtaking incongruity, to “Little Dark Age,” a song by the indie-pop band MGMT, whose lyrics have become something of an audio meme on TikTok: “Just know that if you hide, it doesn’t go away.”

Hicks’s picture, of course, is an example of traditional photojournalism—a war photographer capturing action at the front lines of battle in a carefully composed image printed in a newspaper. The video, which as of my last count had more than nine million likes, is user-generated content broadcast online, following the aesthetic norms of TikTok: choppy, decontextualized, with catchy pop music in the background. What stands out about coverage of the war in Ukraine so far is how thoroughly the latter category of content has permeated the collective consciousness, providing some of the earliest and most direct glimpses of the Russian invasion. The Internet-focussed podcast “The Content Mines” called the Ukraine invasion “The Most Online War of All Time Until the Next One.” Other publications have dubbed it the “first TikTok war.”

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The invasion of Ukraine isn’t the first conflict to play out over social media. The Arab Spring uprisings and the Syrian civil war used Facebook and Twitter to organize protests and broadcast D.I.Y. footage. But in the intervening years, social platforms have become more geared toward multimedia, and smartphones have become better at capturing and streaming events in real time. Large numbers of Ukrainian civilians are taking up arms to defend their country against Vladimir Putin’s reckless imperialism; they’re also deploying their mobile cameras to document the invasion in granular detail. The war has become content, flowing across every platform at once. One video that has circulated in recent days appears to show a Ukrainian man gingerly moving a mine, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, off of a road and into the woods. A single tweet earned the clip more than ten million views, but it could also be found on YouTube, TikTok, and the sites of various news publications. Perhaps owing to Western sympathies with the plight of Ukrainians, their videos have overwhelmed American feeds in a way few foreign news stories ever do.

It is surreal to see well-established social-media formulas applied to ground warfare. A TikTok from February 12th shows an outfitted Ukrainian soldier moonwalking to Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” in an empty field. It has earned more than twelve million likes and hundreds of thousands of comments, including “be safe guys.” On February 24th, a user named @whereislizzyy posted two perky, influencer-style selfie videos in a luxurious home interior, lip-synching to “Who’s That Chick?,” a song by David Guetta featuring Rihanna. One had a caption that read, “When Russian attacked us so we r leaving at 8 am.” Soon after, a Ukrainian user named @valerisssh posted a video that follows a popular TikTok template in which users point out various cool parts of their homes while a jokey Italian song plays and they perform a matching hand gesture. Here, though, she pointed out things in her “bomb shelter” that “just make sense,” as the meme goes, including a home gym, two toilets, and a “Ukrainian military breakfast” of bananas and yogurt. In a later TikTok, the same user documents a “typical day during war in Ukraine” and ends with a clip of a cinema that had been bombed. The videos are Internet jokes and deadly serious documents at the same time.

These war videos speak to TikTok users in their own language, and the most popular among them can serve as a powerful form of publicity for the Ukrainian cause. In a speech on February 24th, the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, a former actor and skilled social-media user, acknowledged as much, imploring Russian TikTok users along with “scientists, doctors, bloggers, standup comedians” to step up and help stop the war. On TikTok, Ukrainians appear to viewers less as distant victims than as fellow Web denizens who know the same references, listen to the same music, and use the same social networks as they do. The content of the clips and the digital spaces in which they are consumed create a sense of intimacy that photojournalism, with its tinge of voyeurism, sometimes lacks.

In her book “Regarding the Pain of Others,” from 2003, Susan Sontag tracked the evolution of war journalism from photography to television. The Spanish Civil War marked the emergence of the professionalized photojournalist, equipped with a Leica 35-mm. film camera to capture the conflict on the ground. The Vietnam War was the first war to be televised, and it made the carnage in conflict zones “a routine ingredient of the ceaseless flow of domestic, small-screen entertainment,” Sontag wrote. Now the small screens are our phones instead of televisions, and the war footage takes its place in the midst of our 24/7 feeds, next to debates about a TV series finale, cute animal photos, and updates on other contemporary disasters. The various forms of content disorientingly overlap—the professional with the amateur, the intentional with the incidental. The Instagram account of an Internet-famous cat named Stepan, whose owner lives in Ukraine and has amassed a million followers, recently shifted from sharing goofy pet portraits to posting photos of a missile attack on Kharkiv. Such hard evidence of the invasion suddenly punctures the placelessness of the Internet, reminding viewers that they are watching a real person in real danger.

For Sontag, photographs had a “deeper bite” than video when it came to documenting war. A single image taken on the ground could endure for generations, like Robert Capa’s Spanish Civil War photograph “The Falling Soldier.” Social-media documentation is less likely to last—it’s ephemeral by design—but for the consumer it can create a more immediate, immersive experience of a situation unfolding in the moment. A woman gives birth while sheltering in a Kyiv metro station. Elsewhere in the metro, families huddle with their cats and dogs. A Ukrainian father says a tearful goodbye to his family. A farming tractor appears to tow an abandoned Russian tank. A British man records himself packing a bag, including tea, to go to Ukraine “to rescue my wife and son.” Together these snippets present a montage of life suddenly in wartime. They conjure thoughts of how you yourself might react in such banal, terrible circumstances, equipped with only a phone camera. What else is there to do in a bomb shelter but make selfie videos and broadcast them to the outside world? Zelensky himself has made shrewd use of this sense of relatability, captivating the world with his shaky selfie videos recorded from the street. He used this format to combat rumors that he had fled the country, casting himself as an everyman braving a vast struggle, David versus Goliath. In a video posted on February 25th, he stood in front of a clutch of his government officials. “We are all here,” he said.

There are obvious downsides to receiving updates from a chaotic war through scattershot bits of digital media. On the Internet, all content follows similar laws of motion, whether it’s showing a land invasion in Europe or a cat doing something funny. Whatever is engaging becomes more popular, regardless of its provenance or quality. TikTok’s algorithmic feed in particular makes it easy to passively consume one video and move on to the next without questioning the content’s sourcing. (As one TikTok poster put it, “im literally watching thirst traps followed by footage of w@r crimes and then an ad for moisturizer all within 30s of each other.”) In the past week, a video clip labelled the “Ghost of Kyiv,” purporting to show a fighter pilot shooting down Russian jets, attracted millions of views in various iterations on TikTok. The clip actually came from a video game called D.C.S. World, whose grainy, wavering graphics are easy to mistake for authentic footage. The fact that the video was fake didn’t stop people from sharing it or other similarly mislabelled clips. One video showing Russian paratroopers is from 2016. Another shows a lightning strike at a power plant, not a military attack. An incredible aircraft-versus-artillery clip was computer-rendered in 2021. It requires work to determine if a post is from an actual Ukrainian resident instead of a “war-page” aggregation account trying to rack up followers and likes.

The purpose of war photojournalism is to bear witness; it’s up to the viewer to interpret what she sees in the images that result. As Sontag wrote, “Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen.” Hicks’s photo of the dead Russian soldier is a grisly document of the front lines, a visual symbol of the human cost, on both sides, of an unnecessary war. It may be potent enough to lodge in our minds. The flood of TikTok videos is perhaps more likely to evoke our bemused awareness, a feeling of sympathy that lasts only long enough to keep us scrolling. Yet as the Russian convoys outside of Kyiv continue attempting to penetrate the city center, traditional news organizations are pulling their journalists to safety. Social media is an imperfect chronicler of wartime. In some cases, it may also be the most reliable source we have.