The Myth of the ‘First TikTok War’
Have you been watching the war in Ukraine via TikTok? Supposedly, everyone has been. “This is the first war that will be covered on TikTok by super-empowered individuals armed only with smartphones,” the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote in February. That same week, all kinds of publications started referring to the invasion as “the first TikTok war”; New York Magazine coined the portmanteau “WarTok.” TikTok is a new global platform, and smartphone saturation is new in Ukraine, so perhaps it’s a reasonable claim. But is it a useful one?
The history of war is also a history of media, and popular memory associates specific wars with different media formats. Vietnam was the first television war. The first war in Iraq, in 1991, was the first cable-news war, or the . (The network famously a “coup” by successfully broadcasting live from Baghdad.) Twelve years later, the American invasion of Iraq was “” again, but instead became the Fox News war. It “the YouTube war,” in which, as one journalism professor , soldiers made “personal and at times shockingly brutal” homemade titled ; then, the following spring, the U.S. military blocked troops from accessing YouTube on military computers. So the YouTube war ended. The Iraq War continued.
