This month, 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.
Mr. Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, tweeted at the official Twitter account of Mr. Putin’s presidential office, challenging the president 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 Mr. Musk as the Terminator or Rocky Balboa. Putin supporters — including the Russian space chief Dmitry Rogozin — mocked Mr. Musk for the tweet, and Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman head of Chechnya, a part of Russia, offered to train Mr. 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 Mr. 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 — from celebrities and socialites posting glamorous selfies with promises of thoughts and prayers in the captions to whatever the heck the actor AnnaLynne McCord’s slam poetry was. 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.
But it’s important to note that 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 organisation 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,” Mr. McLuhan conceded that the total effect of this mosaic approach “is to enforce a deep sense of human solidarity.”
On social media, however, these disparate items appear singularly, and they disappear as we slide our thumbs down our screens. The result isn’t a mosaic but a blur in which the trivial follows the dire, the personal appears alongside the public. War starts to blend with entertainment (after all, it keeps popping up on one of the devices many turn to for entertainment). Before we know it, we have a tech billionaire challenging the Russian president to a fight, as if they were in a high school locker room. And the crowd cheers them on.
What’s the harm, you might ask? For one thing, some of what we see on social media is simply untrue, which can mislead us about the facts of what’s happening. Take, for example, a video of what appeared to be a young Ukrainian girl confronting a Russian soldier, which went viral at the end of February. In fact, the video was from 2012, and showed the Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi confronting an Israeli soldier. 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.
All this scrolling can also lead to compassion fatigue. For Mr. McLuhan, who famously declared that “the medium is the message,” the tactile experience of media — in his time print publications, radio and television — was an essential component of its effect on the audience. On social media, as we banish posts to the ether with a flick of the thumb, we caress their images, gently touching the army tanks, the faces of celebrities, the bodies of civilians in the street; we wear them close to our chest and sleep next to them at night. This intimacy with violence and suffering can feel disturbing or emotionally triggering; it can also be desensitising.
It also promotes a sense of complacency; we believe we already know what is happening, and can be downright smug in our convictions about who are the “bad guys” and who are the “good guys.” For Putin supporters, Mr. Musk’s tweet was further evidence of the West’s plot against Russia; for Mr. Musk’s fans, it was just another reason to love the irreverent billionaire.
Some of the strangest replies to Mr. Musk’s tweet were the ones thanking him for “helping” Ukraine. It’s unclear how, exactly, they believed the tech executive was helping the country, or why they would think Ukraine was his to gamble, but it’s indicative of how attention is often conflated with activism on social media.
This isn’t to say that nothing good can ever come from attention garnered on social media. For a counterexample, see President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine’s effective pleas for international support, which have raised morale and helped to raise substantial funds for Ukrainian people (including, according to Zelensky, $35 million, thanks to the efforts of Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis, largely through social media). The videos he has released have helped him come across as statesmanly and unifying, a leader who has been compared to Winston Churchill.
In the foreword for “The Mechanical Bride,” Mr. McLuhan references Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “A Descent Into The Maelström,” in which a sailor saves himself from drowning in a whirlpool by studying its currents and observing its movements with detachment. In this same way, we might try to identify and recognise the algorithmic undercurrents at the center of social media — but for most of us, the more practical solution is probably to just step away, and to find a better way to stay informed about world events.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Hayley Phelan is a writer and journalist. Her debut novel, “Like Me”, follows a would-be social media influencer.