The Meme-ification of the Ukraine war

Last week, as heavy bombardment rocked Ukrainian cities, killing at least hundreds of civilians and sending millions more fleeing, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, the man behind the vicious attacks, was challenged to a duel by the billionaire Elon Musk.

Musk, founder, Tesla and SpaceX, tweeted at the official Twitter account of Putin’s presidential office, challenging him to “single combat” with the “stakes” being Ukraine. The response in the Twittersphere was gleeful: There were mock-up posters promoting the big fight, and Photoshopped images that cast Musk as the Terminator or Rocky Balboa. Putin supporters — including the Russian space chief Dmitry Rogozin — mocked Musk for the tweet, and Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman head of Chechnya, a part of Russia, offered to train Musk, to “change from the gentle (effeminate) Elona into the brutal Elon you need to be.”

“I’ve seen this movie before,” one person tweeted, alongside a meme of the billionaire superhero Iron Man with Musk’s face overlaid. There was something unsettlingly familiar and Hollywood-like about the moment. It was almost as if the tweeters had forgotten they were discussing a complex geopolitical situation, in which millions of lives are at stake — and not just another celebrity feud.

And perhaps that’s inevitable, when Russia’s war on Ukraine itself has became a kind of meme on social media, with images of exploded tanks, refugee convoys and body bags interspersed with Wordle humble brags, NFT hype-tweets and your friends’ adorable pets. “One of the strangest experiences of the modern world is following a war on social media,” Trevor Noah said on a recent segment of The Daily Show. “Because all the other stuff on social media doesn’t go away. It just gets mixed in together.”

The war in Ukraine, which has been called the world’s “first TikTok war,” has eroded the boundaries between war journalism and social media #content — celebrities and socialites posting glamorous selfies with promises of thoughts and prayers in the captions. The Atlantic has called the flood of war-adjacent content “milling,” a sociological term to describe what the magazine called the often “Ugly, Embarrassing Spectacle” that ensues in the immediate aftermath of tragedy.

This is not necessarily a natural social phenomenon. Rather it is the direct result of an algorithm developed by profit-seeking companies. “Social media is optimised for the quickest and hottest and most outrageous takes,” Max Stossel, an adviser at the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit firm dedicated to reimagining digital infrastructure, told me. “It’s a process that’s really at odds with accuracy and thoughtfulness.”

And as social media becomes, for an increasing number of people, a primary source of news, the structures of the medium itself can warp our understanding of what’s happening in the world. The Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan noted in 1951 that the front page of a newspaper illustrated daily the “complexity and similarity of human affairs,” with news from all over the world printed side by side. Despite what he called “the frequent sensational absurdity and unreliability of the news,” McLuhan conceded that the total effect of this mosaic approach “is to enforce a deep sense of human solidarity.”

Besides raising important questions about why certain conflicts seem to garner our clicks and others do not, the mislabeled video is illustrative of the kind of broken-telephone messaging that happens when we mindlessly “like” and share. Even without blatant untruths, by compressing complex global events into flat images that can be understood with little context, social media tends to promote simplistic narratives that confirm existing biases. This leaves users incredibly vulnerable to misinformation and propaganda — as in Russia, where misleading videos, images and clips present the war as a righteous conflict.