From Anne Frank's diaries to TikTok videos: the war told (almost) live

The one in Ukraine has become the first war broadcast on TikTok, just as Vietnam was the first televised war.

As journalist Kyle Chayka pointed out in

, sometimes in times of war, social media is "the source we can most trust."

Many of those who document it are journalists;

others, people with no media affiliation, but they all have a crucial weapon: a smartphone.

In the voyeuristic and hypermediatized society in which we live, it is not surprising that there are those who document their daily lives on social networks, even in a city besieged by war.

Documenting reality, although it has sometimes been considered an egotistical act, is ultimately an attempt to connect with other human beings, share the experience and inform.

Several memories of writers who suffered the Holocaust have gone down in the history of literature.

Some survived and were able to use the events as a driving force, such as the Austrian psychoanalyst Viktor E. Frankl, others remained tied to the suffering that it caused them, such as the Hungarian Nobel laureate Imre Kertész and the Italian Primo Levi.

Others died in extermination camps, like Anne Frank,

The times change.

Now autobiographies, instead of being read in printed book format, could well be reconstructed digitally, from their social networks.

Marta Figlerowicz, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University, underlines the speed of development.

“Many may consider that this is why the narratives on TikTok are superficial, but it doesn't have to be that way.

Creators will need to explore short rhetorical forms,” she says.

An example is Lily Ebert, a Holocaust survivor who, at the age of 98, tells about her experience in Auschwitz on TikTok to almost two million followers.

Or the Ukrainian Valeria Shashenok, 20 years old and with a slight resemblance to the famous American tiktoker Charli D'Amelio, who went viral on TikTok by narrating how her days passed in a bunker in Cherníhiv,

The difference with other people who documented their experience in the middle of the war is that Shashenok does it with irony: "I'm living my best life 🥰🥰🥰 Thank you, Russia!", he writes in the video with more than 42 million views published by the March 4.

In it, he narrates the drama of living in a bunker: "My dog ​​does not understand why we live in the basement" / "Go out into the street and see what Putin has done to my city."

Meanwhile, a happy song plays in the background.

In another, more recent video, he showed how his mother cooked borsch, a Ukrainian soup, in the bunker: "She adds Putin's blood to the beets," "and garlic to give delicious kisses."

Her use of humor only mitigates the drama of the situation, as in another of the videos in which she refers to herself in the third person: "She cooks pasta in a bunker and dreams she's in Italy."

The autobiography built on social networks has a crucial advantage over the traditional autobiography.

One of its main attractions is the affective needs that are established (74.7%), as revealed by an investigation carried out in 2020 by Christina Bucknell Bossen and Rita Kottasz.

Comments and likes on each post bring immediate gratification which, in this case, can help alleviate the trauma of war.

“One of the conclusions we have reached when researching the presentation of the self in virtual environments is that although we have the opportunity to hide behind anonymity, what we finally do is express our identity in a more fluid way. and adapting it to the context.

We use autobiography as a virtual socialization strategy”,

The 858,000 followers of Valeria Shashenok's account are torn between the stupor produced by what they consider a trivialization of the moment and delirious opportunism, and those who show their admiration for the transformative capacity of finding humor in tragedy, in a kind of nod to Roberto Benigni in Life is beautiful.

Others attribute it to the creativity that characterizes generation Z or to a way of dealing with the situation.

Shashenok says that she does it to inform the world of what is happening.

The truth is that TikTok is an effective information platform.

This Chinese social network, which hosts videos between 15 seconds to 10 minutes, was launched internationally in 2017 and already has 1 billion users.

The vast majority are between 18 and 24 years old and use it as their main source of news.

In turn, a good part of the traditional media have opened their own channel on TikTok.

The Washington Post already has 1.3 million followers on the platform.

The rise of TikTok as a new means of communication has even led the White House to choose 30 tiktokers to spread the message they want to communicate about the war in Ukraine.

TikTok is currently resisting in Russia, where propaganda reigns.

Most international journalists left the country on March 5 after the appearance of the new law that penalizes what the Kremlin considers "disinformation" (such as calling war war) with up to 15 years in prison.

Around 15,000 Russian dissidents who oppose the offensive face fines or jail terms, according to the latest available data from OVD-Info, an independent news channel that covers anti-government demonstrations.

Blocked Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, which shows the power of these platforms to question the Putin government, TikTok resists.

Although with strong restrictions: no one can do direct or upload new videos anymore.

Content from international accounts is also not accessible.

However, the new generations are fast and many Russians manage to evade censorship by using a private connection (VPN).

The use of this technology has increased 600% in Russia since Ukraine was invaded, according to calculations by TOP10VPN, a site that tracks the use of this technology.

“In Russia there is a lot of disinformation and most Russians do not believe that my country [Ukraine] is at war… My mission is to show the world what is happening.

You can watch the war on TikTok," Shashenok explained to CNN.

“Hello, I am Russian and although it is not my personal responsibility, I want to apologize for everything that has happened to both you and your country,” a user replied a few days ago in the March 14 video.

In it, the tiktoker published how her evacuation was and her arrival in Poland after spending 10 hours standing on one of the trains and waiting five hours at the border.

She has traveled alone.

Men between the ages of 18 and 60 are not allowed to cross the border, so her father has had to stay and his mother has decided to accompany him.

The two remain in the bunker.

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