Is Ukraine the First TikTok War?

Social media started to play a role in geopolitical events with the Arab Spring. Back then, it meant Facebook and Twitter. Today, the social media on which the Ukraine war is fought is TikTok. The Ukraine related content on TikTok is higher than any other social media. It’s almost an official channel, writes Kari Paul:

“In a speech, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, appealed to “TikTokers” as a group that could help end the war. Last week, Joe Biden spoke to dozens of top users on the app in a first-of-its kind meeting to brief the influencers on the conflict in Ukraine and how the US is addressing it.”

 

Not everyone is happy with this though. Some are horrified at world leaders seemingly legitimizing such “frivolous” apps. Others disagree:

“Many of the problems we are seeing with it today stem from this false idea that it is just a dancing app.”

 

Of course, like any other social media, fake content flows through TikTok as well:

“Videos of unrelated explosions were re-posted as if they were from Ukraine. Media uploaded from video games were passed off as footage of real-life events.”

Real news, fake news, propaganda – it’s all there on TikTok.

 

But wasn’t all this true of Facebook and Twitter as well? True, but TikTok has some features that make it different in some ways. For example, TikTok makes it insanely easy to remix videos. Which makes it very hard to contextualize or fact-check such remixed videos:

“It is difficult… to discern truth from rumor, parody and fabrication.”

 

Another difference is that Facebook and Twitter were limited to feeds from sources you friended or followed. TikTok, on the other hand, is famous for finding videos from anybody on the planet that its algorithms determine you might like. And since those algorithms follow machine learning (i.e., they learn and adapt by doing), it’s impossible to know which videos end up on most users’ feeds.

 

TikTok now faces the same problem companies like Facebook faced – how do they moderate or check content? With videos, the content is visual and in every possible language under the sun, which makes the problem even harder. So while TikTok is trying to cut down the disinformation, it ain’t easy.

 

In a world where more and more people consume their news from their apps, and not from news media (sites, apps or print edition), the power of social media to influence and even define the perspective is only going to increase. We can curse the apps as much as we like, but the reality is that it is our collective preferences that has led to this situation.