As I write this an international war is unfolding in real time on our screens, big and small. Of course, it’s not the only major contemporary conflict and we shouldn’t be myopic, ignoring fighting in other nations. There are skirmishes around the world, and civil wars laying waste to cities and peoples. But the sight of Russian tanks rolling through sovereign Ukraine, the bombing in Kyiv and other cities, missiles lighting up the sky — it feels different, and in many ways it is.
One of those ways is in the tech sphere. Almost immediately we saw the first demonstrations of the role digital tech is taking in this conflict — from the individual to the geopolitical — and we are barely a week into it. For example, in the first days Ukrainian women reported that Russian soldiers were not just marching in their streets but had also taken to Tinder, seeking companionship on their campaign, or perhaps a different type of action.
Was there ever a better anecdote for the audacity of a straight man on Tinder? Well, there was the Tiktoker who suggested he was changing his Tinder location to Ukraine to find “hotties that need a green card”. One can only hope he was joking, and has learnt something from the enormous backlash to his video.
This conflict has already been dubbed “the TikTok war” by some, including The Guardian (UK) and Reuters. As Wired put it: “[It] is not the first social media war — but it is the first to play out on TikTok”. In the same piece the authors reminded us of the role of social media in the 2011 Arab Spring, in Syria in 2018, and others. The difference, they argued, is that TikTok “has created a stream of war footage the likes of which we have never seen, from grandmothers saying goodbye to friends to instructions on how to drive captured Russian tanks”.
Partially, it is the app’s incredible algorithm that makes it so useful in this moment. But there’s also been the recognition of its influence direct from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who called on TikTokers (particularly Russian ones) to exert pressure to end the war. And on the other side, Reuters reports that Russia’s communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, demanded that the app restrict military-related content and complained that much of the content was anti-Russian.
Yes, TikTok and other social media are useful in a 21st century war — especially to a leader like Zelenskiy who just seems to get it, how to craft a social media-ready image, how to exploit its peccadillos, but it also has an obvious downside: disinformation. There’s already a wealth of fake or wrongly attributed images and videos, including footage from a video game and other prior or faraway conflicts. And here again that legendary algorithm is its own worst enemy, as watching a video multiple times (to ascertain its veracity, perhaps) means you will see more related content and the video itself will be served to more people.
Meta and Twitter both announced on Monday that they’ve removed two organised anti-Ukrainian groups intentionally spreading disinformation on the platforms, one group with direct Russian links and another traced back to Belarus. The former reportedly used computer-generated faces to imply following and credibility.
As Meta’s announcement explains: “This network used fake accounts and operated fictitious personas and brands across the internet — including on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Telegram, Odnoklassniki and VK — to appear more authentic in an apparent attempt to withstand scrutiny by platforms and researchers”.
This is likely to be just the tip of the iceberg. Russia has long been fluent in disinformation (the term literally has Russian origins) and is the most prolific “nation state hacker”. According to Microsoft’s Digital Defence Report from October 2021, “58% of all known nation state cyberattacks [can be attributed] to Russia over the previous year”. Its top three targets? The US, Ukraine and UK.
In fact, cyberattacks were among the first tactics deployed by Russia last week. As the BBC reported, distributed denial of service attacks were used to overwhelm servers, bringing down the websites of several Ukrainian government departments and banks, and “wiper” malware was used to destroy Ukrainian organisational data. There have been counter-offences since, organised by both Ukrainians and from outside the country, with the informal hacker collective Anonymous declaring “war” on Russia.
It’s not just communications that are under threat from cyber warfare, but financial systems and even critical infrastructure such as the power grid and water supply. For now, at least, the internet remains largely accessible in the beleaguered nation — though it was particularly unreliable at the weekend. This prompted Ukraine’s vice prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov, to tweet Elon Musk directly, asking for the SpaceX Starlink satellite internet service to be made available to them. Musk replied personally, in the affirmative.
Both Russian and Ukrainian leaders made appeals to companies such as Apple, Meta and Google to restrict services and clamp down on misinformation — leaving corporate executives miles away to find their ethical lines and navigate their way out of the quagmire.
Just like Russian troops seeking dates mid-occupation, this conflict is holding up a mirror, showing just how digital has rewired us and the world. As veteran foreign affairs commentator Thomas L Friedman wrote for the New York Times: “Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is our first real taste of how crazy and unstable this kind of wired world can get. It will not be our last.”
Finally, all of this is a real showing of the responsibility that comes with the kind of global power now in the hands of companies such as Apple, Google and others, as much as presidents and their advisers.
• Thompson Davy, a freelance journalist, is an impactAFRICA fellow and WanaData member.
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