Breda O’Brien: Wars are not fought on TikTok

Ukraine is winning the online war. What exactly does that mean? What does it mean to a child sheltering in an underground station, the boredom and discomfort of being out of home alternating with blinding terror when shells begin to fall?

The official Ukrainian Twitter account has been praised for its witty tweets and memes and has been contrasted with the clunky propaganda machine employed by Russia. According to this narrative, Ukraine is demonstrating that we share the same online inside jokes and trends and therefore the war in Ukraine becomes relatable.

How, exactly, is that narrative different to the widely condemned commentary by CBS News journalist Charlie D’Agata who reported from Kyiv that “this is a relatively civilized, relatively European – I have to choose those words carefully, too – city, one where you wouldn’t expect that”.

Surely the rightness or wrongness of a cause is not determined by how internet savvy the proponents are?

If it is wrong to imply clumsily that we should care about Ukrainians because they are similar to ourselves. Why is it right to say they are relatable because they know how to use the internet in ways that appeal to those of us sitting safely at home, thousands of miles from the conflict?

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Surely the rightness or wrongness of a cause is not determined by how internet savvy the proponents are?

There is another narrative that using the internet as a medium is just a natural outgrowth of the way previous generations deployed cartoons, followed by photographs and then, televised images to influence public opinion.

Somehow, TikTok and its clones, like Instagram reels, do not feel like a natural outgrowth of anything except the relentless modern tendency to reduce everything to content and views.

Sure, Life magazine probably wanted to sell copies as much as, or more than, it wanted to influence public opinion when it published 10 pages containing 242 photographs of young men killed during seven days of the Vietnam conflict.

Media outlets have always wanted to make money. It still says something about the trivialisation, or perhaps more accurately the TikTokification, of important issues that today so many individuals are making a very good living by using the Ukraine conflict to attract views.

TikTok has much more in common with advertising than it has with photo journalism. Sound is central to TikTok.

It can be as simple as a clip from an old advertisement, a phrase from a song, or just an amusing sound. If you are lucky, the sound from your uploaded video will spawn thousands of other videos, either replicating the concept or reproducing the idea with a funny twist, like getting a dog to perform a popular TikTok dance.

TikToks about Ukraine that use trending TikTok sounds garner millions (that is not hyperbole but meant literally) more views than videos that do not. Am I just showing my age that I find this disturbing?

TikTok's appeal lies partly in the belief that because it is dominated by ordinary people, it is somehow more trustworthy. A recent BBC article described 20-year-old Marta Vasyuta as "a regular 20-year-old Ukrainian" who went from hundreds of views of her TikToks to hundreds of thousands when she started uploading footage from the Russian invasion.

One of her videos of bombs falling on Kyiv, which is accompanied by a viral sound, a clip from American rock band MGMT’s song Little Dark Age, had 50.3 million views at the time of writing.

Vasyuta is not even in Ukraine . . . She finds the videos that she posts on Telegram

Vasyuta explains that “some people don’t trust even professional journalists, even verified sources”.

She believes that being a regular young woman from Ukraine makes people trust her more.

The interesting thing is that Vasyuta is not even in Ukraine. She was visiting friends in London and now cannot return home. She finds the videos that she posts on Telegram. She says, and there is no reason not to believe her, that she makes strenuous efforts to authenticate them.

But if a young woman who is not even in Ukraine is more trustworthy than verified sources, what does that say?

The focus tends to be on the amount of disinformation on TikTok and other channels and this deserves all the attention that it gets.

My sense, though, is that the phenomenon of one- to three-minute videos (preferably accompanied by trending sounds) being the primary channel through which young people receive information about the war or anything else important is deeply concerning. This is true even if all the videos are authenticated and accurate.

It is easy to dismiss concern about the effect of cyberculture on our empathy and attention span as just the latest manifestation of a generation gap. We elder folk don’t get the online world that younger people inhabit and that is why we worry about it.

Sometimes that is true. And sometimes a phenomenon provides a genuine reason to worry.

If something is not trending on TikTok, does it make a sound? And what happens when it stops trending?

Ukrainians deserve far more than our judgment that they are winning the online war. They deserve our sustained attention, our welcome for refugees, and our commitment to making financial sacrifices to give sanctions a real chance of forcing Russia into a sustainable peace.