Twitter in particular seems particularly dystopian these days. Updates from the front are mixed up in the Ukraine with news from the world of sport or sloppy memes. If the short message service was once intended as a service to stay up to date even in global conversations, nowadays everything seems equally important there in a strange way.
Perhaps the algorithmically curated news feeds aren’t designed for such content and are starting to fail. At the same time, everyone has an opinion. In the past week, social media users have apparently exchanged their expertise in infectious diseases for specialist knowledge in Eastern European studies and have also quickly completed a crash course at the officers’ school.
The fog of war has never been denser than in today’s information environment. The misleading images don’t even have to be part of a large-scale disinformation campaign by the Kremlin. Like Tech Magazine input reported, they are also used for everyday scams. So large Instagram accounts suddenly switched to reporting on the war. Loud input However, the accounts are not run by local journalists, but by a young man from the American Midwest who manages a network of viral content on the Internet.
There is no algorithm and no battle of opinions in the Maidan stream
The images shown are for monetization only, the postmodern war profiteer is only interested in marketing its popularity. Between short videos of bombing raids – real or not – there is also advertising for the private porn platform Onlyfans. Don’t be afraid to ask for donations either. Of course, the sorting algorithms of the tech portals do not reward the truth, but those who know their mechanisms best and use them to their own advantage. War is content.
Martial account names such as livefromukraine, povwarfare or militaryfootage are enough for the audience to take the content shown seriously. Here the images encounter a maximally desensitized audience that has never learned to pose the question of authenticity. More than 30 years ago, media theorists bemoaned the hyper-reality of footage broadcast by CNN of the second Gulf War. How do you interpret the fact that during the invasion of Ukraine, screenshots from the military video game “Arma 3” were unquestioningly accepted as images from the real war on relevant platforms?
So where to turn in all this madness? Perhaps best of all with technology from the early days of the Internet. On the app cello, which can turn any smartphone into a walkie-talkie, you can follow individual channels from Kiev or Lviv. Every second the people from there have their say. A few days ago people were still outraged and cursed Putin in the most imaginative way. Now their voices are quiet.
From the Maidan and other places in Kiev are still broadcasting webcam live their pictures online. From high above, the lens focuses on the golden statue of the Independence Monument. A bright blue sky over the city, in the background all you can hear for a long time is the rushing of the wind. Then scattered sirens and automatic weapon fire. More than a hundred thousand people are watching.
The stream from the Maidan stands out against all the noise clogging the other channels. Nothing is fake here, there is no algorithm and no battle of opinions that you can possibly emerge victorious from. The live stream doesn’t try to convince the viewer of anything. He doesn’t follow an agenda. It simply shows things as they are.