TikTok’s algorithm gives people videos they believe they’d love to see. And now there are a lot of war videos: For eight days from February 20 to February 28, views on videos tagged #Ukraine jump from 6.4 billion won arrive 17.1 billion won—Rate of 1.3 billion views per day or 928,000 views per minute. (Content tagged # Украина, Ukraine in Cyrillic, is nearly universal with 16.4 billion views as of Feb. 28.)
Marta Vasyuta, 20 years old, a Ukrainian who now lives in London, shares many of the most viral videos about Ukraine on TikTok. When Russia invaded, Vasyuta found herself stranded outside the country and decided to co-create her TikTok profile, which had only a few hundred followers, into a platform to share footage of the conflict from Telegram to the wider world. “If you post a video from Ukraine, it will only be seen by Ukrainians or Russians,” she said. That oddity is a result of TikTok often localizing the videos it shows on the For You page. Hoping that her location in London would help footage from Ukraine pass the algorithm, she began posting. Until she was blocked from posting by TikTok last weekend – which she thought might have been caused by Russian bots reporting her profile in bulk – she was reached 145,000 followers. (A notice from TikTok showed 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 to clarify which rules were violated.)
Despite the suspension, many of Vasyuta’s videos have sold out longer than TikTok, thanks to the ease with which videos can be downloaded and re-shared on other social media platforms.
Off-platform video sharing has has long been a deployed tool by parent company ByteDance to help promote TikTok. One of Video TikTok by Vasyuta, showing the bomb dropped on Kyiv, has been viewed 44 million times on TikTok — and shared on the app nearly 200,000 times. It’s hard to tell where it went — TikTok’s sharing method removes the ability to trace the video back to its source — but search on twitter shows many shared videos from TikTok on the platform.
But the speed and accessibility in and out of TikTok comes at a cost. Emotional videos can cause people to ignore information that is legit or not. Combine that with a younger, sometimes less media-savvy audience, and it’s a recipe for trouble. “The information is really meant to try to elicit an emotional response,” says Venema, “It’s something that infuriates you, makes you emotional, pulls your heart out. Combine those two, and that’s why there’s so much of it. “
How emotion can help create a viral hit is best demonstrated by a video that shows a fatigued soldier bowing down to the grain fields below with a smile. grin on his face. Videoposted to TikTok and reshared on Twitter, rated 26 million views on the app and is intended to give an overview of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Except it didn’t. The video is from 2015 and was originally posted on Instagram, fact checker found.
