Russia and Ukraine: A Content Analysis of “The World’s First TikTok War”

Abstract

The 2022 Russia-Ukraine war has been deemed by many news outlets the world’s first TikTok war due to the prominence of war-related content on the algorithmic video-sharing platform (Chayka, 2022). Existing literature covers tangential topics such as the use of social media in other conflicts throughout history, the Russian disinformation campaigns that were deployed during the 2022 Russian invasion, and the use of TikTok as an information-sharing platform in other contexts, but there is currently very little academic literature on the use of TikTok during the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war. To address this, I collected 192 viral TikToks across 3 relevant hashtags, developed a codebook to analyze various qualitative dimensions of the TikToks, and collected system data on these TikToks such as user engagements, sounds, and hashtags. From this corpus I compared user engagements between 1) verified and unverified creators 2) videos depicting different emotions, particularly fear, sadness, and humor 3) videos depicting news content and scenes of war featuring soldiers and civilians, and 4) videos using platform affordances or following trends. I find that although citizen journalism through TikTok has been successful in informing global audiences and offering an inside perspective on the lived realities of the war, influencers and news outlets are still dominating the broader narrative, a phenomenon I coin as algorithmic gentrification. Additionally, I find that humorous videos receive more shares:views than fearful videos; news reporting receives more shares than videos depicting scenes of war with soldiers but less likes than scenes of war featuring civilians; and platform affordances play a negligible role in a video’s success compared to a creator’s follower count.