56 International The Economist April 2nd 2022
depicted: “I saw this,” Francisco Goya
wrote under one of the etchings in his clas
sic series “The Disasters of War”. Photogra
phers began documenting conflict in the
mid19th century, but cumbersome equip
ment and processes made capturing com
bat impossible. Instead, pictures tended to
show the aftermath of fighting. The inven
tion of lightweight, 35mm cameras made it
possible to operate at the front lines. Dur
ing the Spanish civil war, photojournalists
took searing pictures that helped mobilise
support for the resistance to Franco, such
as Robert Capa’s image of a Republican sol
dier falling dead. With the Vietnam war,
conflict came to television. Cable news
carried the first Gulf war live. As the critic
Susan Sontag wrote in 2002, “The under
standing of war among people who have
not experienced war is now chiefly a pro
duct of the impact of these images.”
Today’s instantly shareable smart
phonephotographs and videos take things
a step further. Nathan Jurgenson, a social
media theorist, dubs such images “social
photo” and “social video”, and reckons they
function more as communication than
documentation. “Images within the social
stream evoke more than they explain; they
transmit a general alertness to experience
rather than facts,” Mr Jurgenson writes. So
cial photo and video add a rawer, more per
sonal quality to the picture of war. “News
reports give you the big bits, but a lot of
what I’m seeing [online] is everyday life as
the war makes it, like the lines for bread,”
says Simon Kemp of Kepios. “Those scenes
make it a lot more like, ‘Fuck, that could be
me’—it makes it more human.”
Ukrainians have adapted deftly to the
new information environment. It helps to
have a charismatic, socialmediasavvy
leader in Mr Zelensky. His messages em
brace the intimate aesthetic of social me
dia, in contrast to his staid foe in Moscow.
“It’s organic for him to use technology,”
says Mr Fedorov, who ran digital opera
tions for Mr Zelensky’s presidential cam
paign in 2019. “He wants to share, wants to
spread the word, wants to convey his emo
tions—like a normal person.” Officials
across Ukraine have adopted the approach.
The Ukrainian government has taken to
social media to pursue various aims. On
March 17th Dmytro Kuleba, the foreign
minister, sought to embarrass Nestlé for
refusing to cease operations in Russia by
posting a memestyle image that contrasts
“Nestlé’s positioning”—a picture of a
healthy child—with “Nestlé’s position”—a
picture of a dead child. The digital ministry
launched a chatbot on Telegram that al
lows citizens to send videos and locations
of Russian forces; it receives around
10,000 messages a day, which Ukraine’s ar
my uses to supplement traditional intelli
gence. The government uses social media
to spread everything from informationabout evacuation trains to stories about
heroic soldiers. The tales have been no less
powerful even when untrue: the soldiers
from the islet in the Black Sea were not
killed after delivering their famous line,
but captured, a fact that has done little to
dent their reputation as martyrs.
The government has had plenty of help.
Across Ukraine, publicrelations special
ists, designers and other media types have
banded together through bottomup net
works that emerged within hours of the in
vasion. “Everybody is an information war
rior these days,” says Liubov Tsybulska,
who helps coordinate several teams. One
group packages content aimed at Russians;
another produces patriotic clips for a do
mestic audience; a third focuses on Tik
Tok; a fourth churns out memes; yet others
work to archive socialmedia posts for
hopedfor future warcrimes tribunals. Reality bytes
Just as Ukraine has shifted towards the
West geopolitically in recent years, so has
its online life. When Russia invaded in
2014, Ukraine’s internet culture, like its
economy as a whole, was oriented towards
Russia. The most popular social network
was vk, a Russian platform. In recent
years, Ukraine’s tech scene has boomed;
many developers and designers work for
Western firms. Ukrainian users speak to
Western audiences in a common digital
language. One TikTok user became a viral
sensation by appropriating an Italian song
often used in videos of users cooking pasta
to take her followers on a tour of her fam
ily’s bomb shelter.
That has helped win hearts and minds
in the West. At the end of last year 55% of
Americans saw Ukraine as “friendly” or
“allied”. Two weeks after Mr Putin’s bombs
began falling, more than 80% of Ameri
cans did, a greater share than those whothought the same of France or Japan, both
longtime allies. Diplomats in Europe say
similar shifts in public opinion there have
helped galvanise support for sanctions
against Russia and a more liberal approach
to refugees from Ukraine. The realtime
storytelling has also helped boost morale
among Ukrainians. “We witness how a new
narrative about Ukraine is being born and
it gives us strength, gives us courage,” says
Ms Tsybulska.
Russia has floundered on the informa
tion battlefield inside Ukraine as much as
on the physical one, despite its reputation
as a pioneer of disinformation. Russian
forces have handed out flyers appealing to
“comrades” and taken over radio stations
to broadcast speeches by Mr Putin.
“They’re using crap from the second world
war,” says Kristina Berdynskykh, a Ukrai
nian journalist.
But the preponderance of Ukraine
friendly messages on Western users’ news
feeds hardly means the information war is
over. “The narrative that Ukraine has won
the information war is complacent and not
necessarily backed up by anything empiri
cal,” Mr Miller argues. Researchers say that
social networks’ unwillingness to share
data makes it difficult to assess how infor
mation is spreading online.
Inside Russia, Mr Putin has kept a grip
on the narrative by tightening the flow of
information. Twitter, Facebook and Insta
gram have all been banned; users of TikTok
cannot create new content. New censor
ship laws make calling the war a war pun
ishable by up to 15 years behind bars. The
authorities have created Telegram chatbots
for citizens to inform on those spreading
“incorrect information”.
Russian disinformation campaigns
seem to be targeting Asia, Africaand the
Middle East, tapping into antiWestern or
antiAmerican sentiments, says Mr Miller.
A team at Demos used semantic analysis of
accounts pushing proPutin hashtags on
Twitter and found a preponderance of ac
tivity in South Africa and India.
As the physical war settles into a bloody
grind of attrition, so will the one for atten
tion online. Westerners “like the stories
about tractors and tanks, but not the sto
ries about pregnant women suffering,” Ms
Tsybulska sighs. “Tractors and tanks are
entertainment, but if you acknowledge the
suffering, we all have to do something.”
Photographs did not end war by making
suffering visible, as some hoped they
would in the 19th century; neither will so
cial images now. Yet they will continue to
be posted and shared.AsUkraine demon
strates, real life is increasingly lived on
line, at peace and at war.nSharing the painPaid internships: We’re hiring interns to write
about foreign affairs. Anyone can apply.
See www.economist.com/foreignintern2022