attack will be ticked

It’s hard to express in words the cell phone video of a desperate Ukrainian trapped in a subway. Images captured by civilians have helped raise concerns about Russia’s possible use of (illegal) cluster war materials. And Ukraine’s President Zelensky has used social media to reassure the country that he is still in office and is still fighting.

No one believes the silly videos Russia posted in an attempt to justify its unprovoked attack. But everyone believes the video posted on his target. Tank columns, explosions, ruined buildings, armed volunteers – pick a topic, and even cable news stations are sharing plenty of amateur videos depicting it.

During the Civil War and World War I, the only way to get news from the front was to grab the latest edition of the local newspaper, which was probably heavily headlines with skimpy wire reports. In World War II, people listened to radio bulletins and CBS’s Edward R. Muro became one of the most famous journalists in the world. By the Vietnam era, we waited for the latest details on the evening news. To keep up with the 1991 Gulf War and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq more than a decade later, we turned on cable news whenever we wanted.

Through all those changes, there was one constant: Information was distributed, for better or worse, by journalists employed by professional news organizations.

That’s all changed.

Ordinary people caught in Russia’s invasion of their country, with their cell phone cameras, have become law professor and blogger Glenn Reynolds who, long ago in the Internet age, was memorably labeled “an army of Davids”. : Individual writers whose ability to document in real time the effects of Putin’s grand strategy may be the most effective weapon in uniting the West against him.

It is difficult to narrow the gap made by this development. As someone once wrote, modern warfare has isolated ordinary people from the events on the battlefield.

But that is all over. Ukraine’s social media posts represent the nostalgia of the tendency to bring the battlefield before us. Citizen journalists are fighting, in the words of one veteran, “the most documented war in human history.”

Nowadays, nearly half of American adults get their news from social media. Furthermore, recent years have seen a sharp increase in the consumption of user-generated videos, especially among the younger generation. And social media users are more likely to engage with content that doesn’t include a lot of text and includes splashes and colorful images.

Splash and Color Images: Like video.

True, there are risks to watching war online. For one thing, social media users are often less engaged than those who turn to legacy sources for news. But maybe this is old news. This is not the first war to be circulated on social media, even if some may think so.

For another, not all videos are reliable. Considering that the TikTok video with the hashtag #RussiaUkraine has already garnered over 130 million views, we should hardly be surprised by the existence of a large number of fakes, including some that recycle audio from old TikTok posts.

But videos have their merits, and we’re looking at them here. Most important of them: evidence that when we learn about a terrifying event that happened to a group we’re not a member of, we’re more likely to go into anger and hyperactivity after watching a video of the event. Huh. What happened. Thus we see a string of worldwide outrage over the killing of George Floyd in May of 2020 to Putin’s murderous attack nearly 21 months later: once we watch the video, turning the page gets difficult.

During the Vietnam War, those on the pro-escalation side often insisted that World War II would have been televised had GIs brought home from Europe long before the work was completed. I misunderstood the argument then and now I think it is false. What will be interesting in the coming weeks is whether social media images have so outraged the West as to spark similar outrage among ordinary Russians, and thus likely, possibly, to what military historian John Keegan calls a “poisonous drug”. is called. “The excitement of war.

Even before the invasion, Putin was racing to establish control over the operations of social media outlets within Russia’s borders. There is no doubt that he has similar intentions for a conquered Ukraine. Let us all hope that whatever obstacles the regime may create, David’s Ukraine army will find a way.

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of law at Yale University and was clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall of the US Supreme Court. Her novels include “The Emperor of Ocean Park” and her latest nonfiction book is “Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Takes Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”