YOU HAVE probably seen the videos from Ukraine. There is the one where Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, stands outside Kyiv’s government quarter in dim light, holding his smartphone with the camera pointed selfie-style at himself and several senior officials. “We are all here,” he declares, days after Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, sent his tanks across the border. Or the one a Ukrainian soldier took, showing his mates in a snowy field firing anti-tank missiles, set to a thumping techno soundtrack. Or the one where a Ukrainian woman approaches a group of Russian soldiers and tells them to put sunflower seeds in their pockets so that something useful will grow from their bodies when they die.
Each spread online, generating millions of views and likes, reposts and remixes. They became part of the instant digital annals of the war, alongside pictures of Ukrainian tractors towing abandoned Russian tanks, which is now a global meme, and audio of Ukrainian soldiers at an islet in the Black Sea telling an approaching fleet, “Russian warship: go fuck yourself”, which is now a rallying cry at protests as far away as Tokyo.
The war in Ukraine is not, as some commentators rushed to declare, the “first social-media war”. Israel and Hamas have long sparred on Twitter as well as IRL. During Mr Putin’s previous invasion of Ukraine, in 2014-15, digital sleuths used selfies that Russian soldiers posted online to prove their presence on the battlefield in the Donbas region. (Russia subsequently barred soldiers from carrying smartphones while on duty.) Nor is the war in Ukraine the first conflict to appear on a new generation of social networks such as TikTok, which launched in 2016. Videos from the war in Syria have long circulated there; those interested could also find plenty of clips from Nagorno-Karabakh, the disputed enclave that Armenia and Azerbaijan fought over in 2020.
But Ukraine has become the most vivid example yet of how social media are changing the way that war is chronicled, experienced and understood, and how that, in turn, can change the course of a war itself. “Anyone who thinks it is a sideshow isn’t paying attention to war and politics in the 21st century,” says Peter Singer, co-author of #LikeWar, a book about the intersection of social media and modern conflict.
Online chatter can spur rapid shifts in public opinion, especially when pre-existing beliefs are reinforced. Posts on social networks have become a crucial source of information for gatherers of open-source intelligence (OSINT) and conventional media alike. Social media can be used as an “instrument” for governments to achieve wartime aims, says Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister for digital transformation, who has used Twitter to push for a “digital blockade” of Russia by global technology firms. Along with rallying NATO and delivering arms to Ukraine, the White House recently held a briefing on the war for 30 young TikTok influencers. “Whether you like it or not, there are a lot of people on these apps,” says Victoria Hammett, who attended as part of Gen-Z for Change, an activist group.
The war in Ukraine has saturated those apps. “What’s new is the scale of it,” Mr Singer argues. The sheer horror of the war naturally attracts attention. European audiences are especially fascinated because Ukraine is on their doorstep, and they, too, fear Vladimir Putin. Race and psychology may add to the mix: Western audiences may identify more with Ukrainians than Syrians, and thus more readily watch, share or like posts about Ukraine.
But Ukraine is also more wired than other recent war zones. Some 75% of Ukrainians use the internet, according to the International Telecommunication Union, part of the UN. Internet access has remained stable in all but the most brutally besieged Ukrainian cities, thanks in part to satellite coverage. When Russian bombers began pounding Syria on behalf of Bashar al-Assad in 2015, 30% of Syria’s population was online. In Afghanistan at the time of the American withdrawal, the figure stood at less than 20%.
The evolution of social media
