The Economist April 2nd 2022 55
InternationalGoingviral#Putin’sWar
Y
ou haveprobably seen the videos from
Ukraine. There is the one where Volo
dymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president,
stands outside Kyiv’s government quarter
in dim light, pointing his smartphone sel
fiestyle at himself and several senior offi
cials. “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 of his mates in a
snowy field firing antitank missiles, set to
a thumping techno soundtrack. Or the one
where a Ukrainian woman approaches
Russian soldiers and tells them to put sun
flower seeds in their pockets so that, when
they die, something useful will grow.
Each video generated millions of views
and likes, reposts and remixes. They be
came part of the instant digital annals of
the war, alongside images of Ukrainian
tractors towing Russian tanks and audio of
Ukrainian soldiers on an islet in the Black
Sea telling an approaching fleet, “Russian
warship: go fuck yourself”, now a rallying
cry at protests as far away as Tokyo.
The war in Ukraine is not, as some com
mentators rushed to declare, the “first so
cialmedia war”. It is not even the first conflict to appear on a new generation of net
works such as TikTok, launched in 2016.
But Ukraine has become the most vivid ex
ample of how social media are changing
the way war is chronicled, experienced and
understood, and how that 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, coauthor of #LikeWar, a book
about social media and conflict.
Online chatter can shiftpublic opinion,
especially when preexisting beliefs are re
inforced. Posts on social networks have be
come crucial information for gatherers of
opensource intelligence (osint) and con
ventional media alike. Social media can be
an “instrument” for governments to
achieve wartime aims, says Mykhailo Fe
dorov, Ukraine’s minister for digital trans
formation, who has used Twitter to push
for a “digital blockade” of Russia by global
technology firms. The White House re
cently held a briefing on the war for 30
young TikTok influencers.
The war in Ukraine has saturated such
apps. “What’s new is the scale of it,” Mr
Singer argues. The sheer horror of the warattracts attention. European audiences are
fascinated because Ukraine is on their
doorstep. 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.
Ukraine is also more wired than other
recent war zones. Some 75% of Ukrainians
use the internet, according to the Interna
tional Telecommunication Union, part of
the United Nations. Internet access has re
mained stable in all but the most brutally
besieged cities, thanks in part to satellite
coverage. When Russian bombers began
pounding Syria on behalf of Bashar alAs
sad in 2015, 30% of Syrians were online.
The evolution of social media and com
munications technologies plays a role too.
When Russia began its war in 2014, just 4%
of Ukrainian mobile subscribers had ac
cess to networks of 3gspeed or faster; this
year, more than 80% are on highspeed
networks, according to Kepios, a research
firm. In 2014 just 14% of Ukrainians had
smartphones, reckons Kepios; by 2020
more than 70% did, estimates gsma, a tele
communications industry body. When Mr
Putin launched his recent invasion, 4.6bn
people were using social media globally,
more than double the number in 2014. So
cial networks had limited capacity to dis
play videos or livestreams in 2014, but are
now heaving with them.
Such recordings are the latest stage in
the evolution of the imagery of war. Before
the camera, artists had to convince audi
ences they had witnessed the events theyUkraine is the most wired country ever to be invaded