TikTok’s algorithm feeds videos of people it thinks they are hungry to watch. And war videos are in high demand right now: In the eight days between Feb. 20 and Feb. 28, views of videos tagged #ukraine jumped from 6.4 billion to 17.1 billion — a rate of 1. 3 billion views a day, or 928,000 views a minute. (Content tagged #Украина, Ukraine in Cyrillic, is almost as popular, with 16.4 billion views as of February 28.)
Many of TikTok’s most viral Ukraine videos have been shared by Marta Vasyuta, a 20-year-old Ukrainian currently living in London. When Russia invaded, Vasyuta was stranded outside the country and decided to co-opt her TikTok profile, which had only a few hundred followers, on a platform to share footage of Telegram’s conflict with the rest of the world. “If you post a video from Ukraine, probably only Ukrainians or Russians will see it,” she says. That quirk is a result of how TikTok often locates videos it shows on its For You page. Hoping that her London location would help images from Ukraine bypass the algorithm, she started posting. Until she was blocked by TikTok late last week — something she believes was caused by Russian bots massively reporting her profile — she had gained 145,000 followers. (A notice from TikTok reveals that Vasyuta was temporarily banned from posting three videos and one comment that violated the platform’s Community Guidelines. TikTok did not respond to a request for clarification about which rules had been broken.)
Despite the suspension, many of Vasyuta’s videos have a half-life well beyond TikTok, thanks to the ease with which videos can be downloaded and re-shared on other social media platforms.
Sharing videos off the platform has long been a tool used by parent company ByteDance to promote TikTok. One of Vasyuta’s TikTok videos, showing bombs raining down on Kiev, has been viewed 44 million times on TikTok and shared almost 200,000 times outside the app. It’s hard to say where it went – TikTok’s sharing method removes the ability to trace a video back to its source – but a search on Twitter shows many videos shared on the platform from TikTok.
But that immediacy and reach on TikTok and beyond comes at a price. Emotional videos can lead people to overlook whether information is legitimate. Couple that with a younger, sometimes less media literate audience, and it’s a recipe for trouble. “Disinformation is really meant to provoke an emotional response,” Venema says, “it’s the things that make you furious, that make you emotional, that touch your heart. Combine the two, and that’s why there’s so much of it.” .”
How emotion can help create a viral hit is best shown in one video that shows a soldier in military uniforms gliding gently to the grain fields below with a grin on his face. The video, posted on TikTok and re-shared on Twitter, garnered 26 million views on the app and claimed to provide glimpses into the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Except it didn’t. The video dates from 2015 and was originally posted on Instagram, fact-checkers found.
