Detouring, Rerouting, Weaponization: The Secondary Orality of WarTok

Foregrounding the audiovisual format on social media, TikTok revolutionised the dissemination of information and propaganda, especially during
times of armed conflict. Following Russia’s full-scale military invasion of Ukraine, a distinctive phenomenon, termed ‘WarTok’, emerged, engendering a
new paradigm of war programming. Coined during the initial week of the
invasion, WarTok refers to ‘the first TikTok war’ or ‘the war of super-empowered individuals armed only with smartphones’ (Friedman, 2022). As a portmanteau of ‘war’ and ‘TikTok’, this term, although cynical and problematic
in its implications, has drawn significant attention to the platform’s role in
augmenting frontline reporting in Ukraine with meme-driven pro-war propaganda (Mobilio, 2022; Kiparoidze, 2022). In the internet era, where each
conflict is dubbed ‘unprecedented’ and linked to the latest digital innovations (Tiffany, 2022), it becomes crucial to offer context-sensitive analyses of
the underlying conditions that lead to such phenomena. As we demonstrate
below, WarTok necessitates critical scrutiny, not only for its sensationalist
stance but also for the collapse of contexts it entails.
Our contribution explores the realm of memetic TikTok performances,
where war-related Ukrainian and Russian video posts amalgamate multiple
media forms through remix. A focus on these expanded modalities of audiovisual ‘assembly’ (Parry, 2022) implies navigating the platform using networked expressive elements – sounds, effects, stickers, emojis, and
hashtags. Channelling and animating engagement, such an assembly arranges content into searchable formations