A war inevitably becomes a media war, which the invasion of Ukraine has triggered in multiple ways with the internet as its battleground. The battle to win support for the country under attack and its fleeing population is deploying TikTok videos with more immediacy and intimacy than was the case in Afghanistan or Syria. The battle against fake news and false claims about ground realities is feverishly using fact-checking, satellite imagery and open-source technology to get at the truth.
And, then, there is the battle to counter censorship by the Russian State, which acquired a different dimension when it passed a law this month to criminalize any military reporting that differs from the version put out by its army. Playing out alongside is a confrontation between the State and big technology companies in the United States of America.
TikTok is enabling Ukrainians to win hearts with searing imagery. It became the platform of choice because Ukrainians are avid TikTok users. They quickly pivoted from creating personal and work-related videos to capturing troop movements as the imminence of the war became apparent. And once the attacks began, they used their smartphones to show the world how their lives were being destroyed.
For journalists in the US and the UK, these users have become a prime source. An influencer in Kyiv is recording herself in bed on February 23, describing explosions in the distance and wondering if it could be the beginning of something serious. Meanwhile, millennials in Russia began posting videos of shops closing in Russian malls. Later, a Ukrainian making the long escape to Poland documents graphically her journey every step of the way. Ten hours standing in a train, then five hours at the border, before entering the country without a passport. She films other refugees around her “eating delicious dumplings”. Another account of what has been dubbed WarTok described how with TikTok’s algorithm serving up more of what viewers were watching #Ukraine jumped to 1.4 billion views a day.
So four weeks into this war, both the US and Russia are recognizing that these are the people their citizens are watching for news about the attack on Ukraine. Thirty Ukrainian social media influencers were given an unprecedented White House briefing by the Joe Biden administration, even as Vice News reported that Russian influencers are being paid by the Russian State to push a pro-Kremlin narrative. The latter is nowhere near enough for Russia to win the perception war because of two strong factors, one of its own making.
Ukraine’s internet backbone cannot be taken down because of its resilience. The country has over 5,000 broadband internet service providers. And shortly after the invasion began, Elon Musk activated his Starlink internet service responding to a plea from the Ukrainian government for a satellite-based communication service. Meanwhile, the Vladimir Putin government’s move from censorship to threats of criminal prosecution has only increased the reliance of other international media on what they can access on TikTok. In early March, Russia’s Parliament approved amendments to permit up to 15 years in prison for false information about military activities. In the days that followed, a host of major Western news networks ceased operating within the country, not wanting to put their journalists in danger — the BBC, Bloomberg and several public service broadcasters were among them. The Washington Post responded by dropping bylines and datelines to protect its journalists operating out of the country.
Because major US television networks suspended broadcasting from within the country, what you get now when you tune into NBC or CBS is sourced from TikTok. Social media videos are being amplified on network television. It also helps that Ukraine’s social media to counter Russian propaganda and censorship is led by the president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who is a social media force on his own. And because Ukraine’s official Twitter account is anything but staid, it is avidly followed.
The second ongoing battle is the one against misinformation and propaganda. As technological possibilities expand, war-time fact checking acquires a whole different dimension. State propaganda has to be vetted, and the fact that TikTok is a remix app has created the challenge of misleading content on it. The Centre for Information Resilience in the United Kingdom, which verifies videos, found that 80-90 per cent of those it was able to verify were originally posted by civilians. What this war is also seeing is the use of technology to offer an analysis of key movements during the invasion with amateur, open source researchers unpacking the war and reconstructing events on the ground as they geolocate videos of troop movements.
Finally, there is the battle to counter censorship by the Russian State. Downloads within Russia of VPN apps enabling access to blocked services have surged. The messaging app, Telegram, still allows access to both pro-government and independent content and to some foreign media such as the BBC’s Russian service. There is a rush of crowdfunding, much of it from donors in the West to keep independent media alive in both Ukraine and Russia. The leading Russian independent news site, Meduza, which caters to its audience in Russia out of Latvia, has now become a cause célèbre for the media-funding fraternity.
Russia is the loser, so far, in the tech stand-off with the big media companies such as Google and Facebook, which have blocked it off. A journalist from Wired pointed to two effects that were throttling Russia’s online economy: a big exodus of tech workers out of Russia and a hit for Russian search engines, which rely on advertising from these companies.
In her book Putin’s People — on the rise of Vladimir Putin — the former Financial Times journalist, Catherine Belton, describes Putin’s first move against privately-owned media in Russia as taking place just four days after his presidency began in 2000, with a raid on the offices of Vladimir Gusinsky, who owned the Media Most empire, with the popular TV channel, NTV. Throughout the book, she records the Russian president’s obsession with media power, his wielding of State TV, the takeover by the State of private media empires and, then, the handing over of media assets acquired by a State company, Gazprom, to the control of key people he trusted.
But for all his paranoia and heavy-handedness, today the Russian president is proving no match for technology, his principal opponent.
(Sevanti Ninan is a media commentator and was the founder-editor of TheHoot.org)
