Trending in the trenches: Social media is giving birth to a new kind of war journalism

Ukraine has already been tagged the TikTok war. That’s too narrow: it’s Instagram, YouTube and Twitter as well. It’s a high-tech weapons war fought on, and fought with, the matching digital sophistication of social media. It has cut out the journalistic middle, that once-venerated war correspondent — reporter, photographer, camera operator — we trusted to be our eyes on the ground.

It’s powered the agency of people on the ground with a real-time challenge to the “Westsplaining” complacency of talking heads on both left and right eager to jimmy the war into some 19th-century idea of great power competition.

We’ve long believed that in war, truth becomes the first casualty (thanks for the tip, Aeschylus). Maybe no longer, but that means we need to work much harder to know what we can trust and believe.

Inevitably, the medium becomes the message. Video-based platforms like TikTok, Reels and YouTube enable Ukraine’s tech-literate rising generation to broadcast messages that algorithms help proliferate, rewarding the flair, wit and action that video demands.

To retain their relevance, journalists on the ground mesh social media with their still-unique offering of trust and scale, jumping in to embrace what social media delivers while filtering journalistically for accuracy and relevance.

But they can’t compete on access. As the Kyiv Independent’s defense reporter Illia Ponomarenko tweeted to his 850,000-odd followers on the weekend:

In many ways, this war is unique. It’s carried out in a territory with 40 million people having a camera in the pocket. Every single move is being reported online. Everyone’s in the open. You just can’t hide anything. Good luck waging a war of occupation in this environment.

It’s already powering the Ukrainians’ war strategy of both see and be seen. Once, if journalists weren’t there, certain things may as well not have happened. Now, amplifying the views of ordinary people with the power of The New York Times — in, say, occupied Kherson — shatters the fake news of Russia’s “liberation” of Ukraine. 

The country’s TV-trained president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has learnt quickly, reshaping his grabs for the TikTok age.

Outside the country, social media coverage is peeling back increasing layers of complexity. As Crikey wrote last week, open source intelligence, such as publicly available satellite imagery, cuts through the traditional fog of war. On Thursday, Tyre Twitter, of all things, exploded with a discussion about the impact on the invasion of poor tire-maintenance practices on Russian trucks.

It’s chilling when war meets social media in the form of video feeds from combat drones, with a bird’s-eye view of attacks on Russian forces. Sanitised as it may be by the grainy, soundless, black-and-white footage, these are real people dying in our feeds.

We’re still working out just what “truth is the first casualty” means in the social media age. It’s no longer the case that the truth just isn’t out there, or that it’s only available pre-glossed with propaganda. It’s that there’s too much information. It’s too easy to lose sight of what matters in a sea of misinformation, disinformation and manipulation. Social media prioritises attention over truth, the micro over the macro, the new over the repetitive, a tank-stealing farmer video over the relentless, grinding, night-time bombing of Kharkiv.

Sometimes truth ends up sorted out in the give-and-take on social media, with real-time challenges and corrections from journalists and analysts. Fact-checkers like Bellingcat review what they can, although their primary focus is on deliberate misinformation by Russia and banking posts for war crimes monitoring. Big US media, such as The Washington Post, bring their technological clout to the ocean of online video.

Harvard’s Shorenstein Center has highlighted media manipulation through “recontextualised media” — the use of an image, video or audio clip posted in a different or false context than it was originally taken.

Meanwhile, in Russia, we’re seeing the old-school approach to wartime media management: a combination of fake news (Nazis in Ukraine!), a ban on US social media platforms, and significantly toughened restrictions on reporting (including describing the war in Ukraine as, well, a “war”).

The largely state-controlled broadcast media where most Russians get their news has gone along, turning the invasion into “the war that Russians do not see.”  Most independent media have shut up shop while global media is pulling its reporters out of Russia for their personal safety.