In November 2021, following a dispute over editorial independence, the owner of Ukraine’s oldest English-language newspaper, the Kyiv Post, fired its entire newsroom. The sacked journalists promptly set up a new publication, the Kyiv Independent, which three months later has attracted millions of social media followers around the world and is a major source for news and information on the current war. The Independent now forms part of a web of media, local sources, government spokespeople and ordinary citizens posting eyewitness videos and pictures to Twitter, Telegram and TikTok. Like their president, Ukrainians are in mortal peril but for the moment are winning the information war hands down. Their success has already had a dramatic effect on international public opinion and on governments’ policies towards the crisis.
Claims of massive enemy casualties, videos of exhausted Russian prisoners and burned-out Russian tanks are amplified and recycled in often misleading ways
Meanwhile, at 3.45pm on Wednesday, in the midst of a programme justifying the 2014 annexation of Crimea, Moscow-backed English-language TV station RT disappeared, probably forever, from cable and satellite platforms in the UK and Ireland. Vladimir Putin’s Russia, depicted in recent years as the master of asymmetrical conflict through hacking, online disinformation and the judicious application of dirty money, has seemed strangely unprepared this time around. Years spent cultivating friendly voices in Western countries have been undone – for the moment at least – and the regime is scrambling internally to shut down what remains of the independent Russian media while blocking social media.
Old-fashioned propaganda
Despite the clear moral imperative to support the people of Ukraine against Russian aggression, disinformation is never a one-way street. There’s a lot of quite old-fashioned propaganda coming from official and unofficial Ukrainian sources. Claims of massive enemy casualties, videos of exhausted Russian prisoners (filmed in contravention of the Geneva Conventions), and burned-out Russian tanks are amplified and recycled in often misleading ways. The “Ghost of Kyiv”, an unnamed Ukrainian fighter pilot who has supposedly shot down more than 20 Russian aircraft, is a direct descendant of the first World War flying aces mythologised by the combatants of the day. The 13 heroes of Snake Island, who reportedly perished after responding “Go f**k yourself” to a Russian demand for surrender, are now apparently alive after all.
We still rely on professional journalists who put their lives at risk to report with objectivity on what they're seeing, but there is an authenticity to the testimony of ordinary people as they share their experiences on the ground. In that sense, at least, social media has changed the way war is understood by those outside the zone of conflict. But the British columnist who claimed this week that this is "the first social media war" was puzzlingly oblivious to the role played by such media in Syria over the past decade. Does implicit racial bias explain why we pay more attention to Ukraine than to, say, Yemen, as some have argued this week, or is there a more complex mix of cultural affinity and empathy, turbo-charged by the immediacy of the images and words of those suffering?
From 19th-century printed newspapers onward, different media technologies have shaped public consciousness about wars in different ways
And how meaningful is that empathy? Tech culture writer Hussein Kesvani, on Twitter, questioned the “memeification, the marvel-isation, the spectacle of of an ongoing war rendered as entertainment”. For Kesvani, “this is less about a lack of empathy or understanding of human suffering, and far more indicative of platforms doing what they were designed to do in producing everything as content”.
Public consciousness
There is probably some truth to this. The way these platforms are set up is certainly not value-free, and nor is any media. From 19th-century printed newspapers onward, different media technologies have shaped public consciousness about wars in different ways and have sometimes influenced their outcomes. The American debacle in Vietnam would have taken a different course if it hadn’t been for the presence of network TV cameras (a lesson learned by later US governments). Both Gulf wars were framed as rolling spectacles for the era of cable and satellite news. By their nature, social media and smartphones have given greater power to insurgent or oppressed groups to get their message about their own brave resistance or the other side’s atrocities to the world. How much effect this ultimately has is unclear. It seems debatable whether livestreams from Srebrenica would have stopped the genocide there.
What is undeniable is that the current moment of realignment between democracies and autocracies is already reshaping the way we think about media. In years to come, it may seem strange that we ever permitted RT, a firehouse of falsehood, conspiracy theories and propaganda, access to TV services as if it was a normal channel. Or its removal might be seen as the beginning of a new era of restrictions on speech.
In the fog of the information war, nothing is very clear.
