If there’s one thing Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok are good at, it’s distributing content and making it go viral, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is no exception to that rule. Every day, there are new images and videos, and some become that day’s trending topic: the video clip of Ukrainian president Zelensky in military fatigues, speaking defiantly about resisting Russia’s attack; photos of Kyiv’s mayor, a six-foot-seven-inch former heavyweight boxing champion, in army fatigues; a man standing in front of a line of Russian tanks, an echo of what happened in China’s Tianenmen Square during an uprising in 1989; the old Ukrainian woman who told Russian soldiers to put sunflower seeds in their pockets, so sunflowers would grow on their graves; the soldiers on Snake Island who told a Russian warship to “fuck off.” The list goes on.
Not surprisingly, some of these viral images are fake, or cleverly designed misinformation and propaganda. But even if the inspiring pictures of Ukrainians rebelling against Russia are real (or mostly real, like the photo of Kyiv’s mayor in army fatigues, which was taken during a training exercise in 2021), what are we supposed to learn from them? They seem to tell us a story, with a clear and pleasing narrative arc: Ukrainians are fighting back! Russia is on the ropes! The Washington Post writes that the social-media wave “has blunted Kremlin propaganda and rallied the world to Ukraine’s side.” Has it? Perhaps. But will any of that actually affect the outcome of this war, or is it just a fairy tale we are telling ourselves because it’s better than the reality?
The virality of the images may drive attention, but, from a journalism perspective, it often does a poor job of representing the stakes and the scale at-hand. Social media is a little like pointillism—a collection of tiny dots that theoretically combine to reveal a broader picture. But over the long term, war defies this kind of approach. The 40-mile long convoy of Russian military vehicles is a good example: frantic tweets about it fill Twitter, as though users are getting ready for some epic battle that will win the war, but the next day the convoy has barely moved. Are some Ukrainians fighting back? Yes. But just because we see one dead soldier beside a burned-out tank doesn’t mean Ukraine is going to win, whatever “win” means. As Ryan Broderick wrote in his Garbage Day newsletter, “winning a content war is not the same as winning an actual war.”
Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
Hussein Kesvani, a British writer Broderick quotes in his newsletter, has called this process “memeification, the marvel-isation, the spectacle of an ongoing war rendered as entertainment etc. 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.” And it’s not just social media that caters to the desire for speedy outcomes and obvious victories, or at least heroic combatants—traditional media often does this as well, as we’ve noted before when it comes to coverage of things like climate change, or the COVID pandemic. The Ukraine war is full of viral social-media hits right now, but will it be if it lasts as long as the war in Syria?
One risk to seeing social media as painting a realistic picture of Ukraine’s victorious battle against an oppressor is that we have been here before, more than once. One of the first social media-powered conflicts occurred in Egypt in 2011, just a few years after Twitter and Facebook started to become popular, during what came to be called the Arab Spring. The protests against the dictatorial government of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt were fueled in part by tweets and posts on Facebook, and they ultimately culminated in riots that led to the fall of the Mubarak government. But did this usher in a brave new world for Egypt? Not really. The military ultimately took power and installed a general as leader, and the cause of democracy was no further ahead.
It’s also worth noting that one reason people from the West may like sharing inspiring content about Ukraine is that the people in those images look like them. Vicious wars have been going on in places like Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia for decades, but they get little or no social-media coverage. Russia is also a dictatorship that is easy to hate; Palestine has been resisting what amounts to an invasion by Israel for decades, but those images don’t often go viral on Twitter. In fact, a photo of a young Palestinian girl standing up to an Israeli soldier in Palestine did go viral recently, but only because people thought it was a young Ukrainian girl standing up to a Russian soldier.
Here’s more on social media and Ukraine:
Open source info: Despite its flaws, social media has some obvious benefits during a conflict like the one in Ukraine. In some cases the images—and the data surrounding them—can provide evidence that journalists and others need to show what is happening on the ground. Known as “open source intelligence” or OSINT, this kind of imagery can be used to piece together a picture of real-time behavior, by individual journalists or by groups such as Bellingcat, which was created by Eliot Higgins, a British blogger. Higgins became famous for using YouTube and other tools to cover the war in Syria, and has used similar tools to track Russian troop movements in Ukraine.
A “force multiplier“: Casey Newton writes in his newsletter Platformer that social media has put public opinion solidly in Ukraine’s corner, and has made the war “feel like something that average people around the world can participate in.” As he notes, when the government of Ukraine tweeted asking for donations of cryptocurrency to help defend the country, people contributed almost ten million dollars in two days (the total is now above $30 million.) And when a government minister in Ukraine asked for volunteers for an “IT army” of hackers to defend its infrastructure, 175,000 people signed up. Since then, the group has conducted denial-of-service attacks against dozens of Russian websites and services, including banks and government agencies.
Trouble at home: Some argue that the images of dead Russian soldiers on social media might have an impact on the war, because they could weaken Putin’s support at home. “It’s been shocking to see that they’re leaving their fallen brethren behind on the battlefield,” Evelyn Farkas, the top Pentagon official for Russia and Ukraine during the Obama administration, told the New York Times. “Eventually the moms will be like, ‘Where’s Yuri? Where’s Maksim?’” Adm. James G. Stavridis, a former NATO commander, said: “Vladimir Putin is going to have some difficult explaining to do on his home front.”
Other notable stories:
Ukrainian journalist Yevhenii Sakun was killed on Tuesday when Russian forces shelled a television tower in Kyiv, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported. Sakun, 49, was a camera operator for the Ukrainian television station LIVE, which had covered the Russian invasion. The CPJ reported that Sergiy Tomilenko, the head of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine, said Sakun was working at the site with his colleagues at the time of the shelling, and his body was identified by his press card. According to the CPJ, two journalists with a Danish newspaper were also shot and injured while reporting in Ukraine.
Brian Stelter and Bianna Golodryga of CNN reports that journalists from Russia’s last independent news network are fleeing the country, one day after Russia effectively shut the network down. “The country’s Prosecutor General’s Office issued an order on Tuesday to restrict access to both TV Rain, also known as Dozhd, and a radio station, Radio Echo, also known as Ekho Moskvy,” CNN said. “Then on Wednesday, TV Rain’s Editor-in-Chief Tikhon Dzyadko announced on Telegram that he and his family, along with the editorial staff, have left Russia.”
Google said Tuesday that it has blocked mobile apps connected to Russia Today and Sputnik from its Play store, after earlier removing the Russian state publishers from its news products, Reuters reported. Anna Belkina, editor in chief of Russia Today, said technology companies that have cut her outlet off have not produced any evidence of falsehoods. The European Union said both RT and Sputnik have been banned, while Apple said on Tuesday that RT News and Sputnik News have been removed from its app stores outside Russia. Spotify has also removed all content from the two Russian state media outlets.
Savannah Jacobson writes for CJR about WNYC public radio, and how a change at the top has led to turmoil throughout the organization. “In interviews with eighteen current and former WNYC staffers, a picture emerges of Cooper as an energetic and ambitious leader, but also one who is occasionally vengeful and inspires fear rather than trust. Journalists worry any comment that she perceives negatively will doom their careers,” Jacobson writes. “Web traffic is falling back to pre-pandemic levels. Slower, more thoughtfully produced radio is disappearing in favor of cheaper and quicker stories.”
Social Media Today reports that Facebook’s latest “transparency report,” in which the company shows which pages get the most engagement on the platform, has some missing information. The top most-visited page, which got more than 120 million views, is not named — all there is on the graph is a note that says this page was removed for violating the service’s community standards. “This latest report further underlines concerns with Facebook’s distribution, as a Page that it’s identified as sharing questionable posts, for whatever reason (Meta won’t clarify the details), has gained huge traction in the app, before Meta eventually shut it down,” says Social Media Today.
Paroma Soni writes for CJR about a new tool that allows journalists to quickly sort through FOIA data dumps. The tool, called Gumshoe, was developed by Hilke Schellmann, a journalism professor at New York University, along with Dr. Mona Sloane, a senior research scientist, and Julia Stoyanovich, a computer science professor. who led a team of graduate students at NYU’s Center for Data Science. Gumshoe is an artificial-intelligence tool that uses natural language processing to sort through large caches of text documents and categorize them by relevance to the journalist’s main topic of investigation.
The Assembly, a year-old news outlet in North Carolina, announced a crowdfunding campaign to support its journalism. Kyle Villemain, editor in chief, said the paper has formed a partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, “a national nonprofit whose board includes an array of great journalism leaders with ties to North Carolina, including Orage Quarles, Sharif Durhams, Anders Gyllenhaal, and Jim Goodmon.” He said the organization has set a goal of raising $3 million from individuals and foundations over the next two years, and that this money will fund 22 new full-time reporter positions.