By Prof Andrew Hoskins

This war was made for social media’s splintering of realities. Never has there been so much information and disinformation available about war in real-time, recorded via smartphone and satellites, shared via chat and messaging apps, filling digital feeds.

Soldiers, civilians, journalists, victims, aid workers, presidents, journalists, are all recording and uploading their experience and vision of events second by second, tracking every twist and turn. The battlefield seems open to all.

But it is wrong to call the Russian war against Ukraine in any way transparent. ‘Open source’ has always been a misnomer. Rather, this is more like crowd-sourced war, that is a war in which the claims, opinions and outrage of anyone who can post, link, like or share on social media, splinter multiple realities of experience.

This is an advanced kind of subscription war, where you choose to subscribe to your own tailored version of warfare in your feed, or avoid it altogether. This makes it the most personalised war in history. On some platforms, such as TikTok, your view of war is strongly shaped by algorithms, responding to what you have looked at or not, and for how long, before. This is a kind of swipe war, a vision of war based upon your prior choices and interests, a war that ‘filter bubbles’ have been waiting for.

On other platforms, algorithms are less influential, but individuals still subscribe to channels offering a highly personalised version of war. And it is Telegram in which this kind of war thrives, at the heart of the digital battlefield between Ukraine and Russia, with more than 70% of Ukrainians using it.

For instance, the ‘Look for Your Own’ channel is a stream of war porn. Unadulterated photos and video of the dismembered bodies of presumably Russian soldiers, and captives, but also the bodies of civilians, including naked children. It was created by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine to identify captured and killed soldiers of the Russian army. This was supposedly because Russia’s Ministry of Defence has given no details of any military losses at first and had omitted the actual number of dead and captured Russian soldiers in Ukraine later.

This is a digital instrument of psychological warfare. Many of the posts have responses in the form of comments and emojis laughing, celebrating capture, injury and death. Although in the past few weeks, many of these disturbing images had been pixelated or removed. Presumably, as Ukraine begins to pursue prosecutions for war crimes, someone thinks these are now worth hiding.

What is deemed acceptable in what we as readers or viewers will tolerate in seeing the bloody reality of war changes over time. The historian Jay Winter says that the photography of 20th century war is highly sanitised and official. The photographs from millions of soldiers’ pocket cameras scattered in all kinds of back rooms and attics for more than a century, show the forbidden, gruesome and bloody reality of the First World War. They have still yet to really colour the public history of that war.

In 21st century smartphone war, however, there is no gap between capture and share, between snapping selfies and sending. Ukraine’s horrors are hiding in plain sight, as despite these images being available to all in a click or a swipe, they are pushed out of the sanitising mainstream media frames.

Whereas wars of the last century tended to be marked in memory years after they had ended, the battle over this war’s memory rages in real-time. This includes the organisations dedicated to the collection, archiving and analysis of digital documentation for the potential pursuit of future international crime prosecutions, such as Mnemonic and Bellingcat, and even the Kyiv Oblast Department of Tourism has produced a Virtual Museum of War Memory.

This battle is also with digital platforms and algorithms, wielding power without accountability, in their supreme capacity to determine what is searchable, censored or erased. Are these the new guardians of the remembrance of war? This is a digital turn on what the professor and novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, has called the ‘industry of memory’, but one which enables the inhumanities of war to be put to new ends.

Digital media offer new potential for an amazingly rich future memory and history of the experience and consequences of warfare. This is vital for individual and social resilience, learning lessons, honouring the dead, pursuing war crimes and for preventing further catastrophes. And the millions of messages, images and video, pouring out of the smartphones in Ukraine, surely makes this the most documented and the most personalised war in history.

But this is no panacea for either understanding or remembrance. Instead, social media makes war and memory in their own image, through the siege for attention, disinformation and splintered realities; choose your own feed, select your own memory.

Looking back on this war, what will we find?

Andrew Hoskins is Professor of Global Security at the University of Glasgow. He founded the journals of Memory Mind & Media, Memory Studies, and Digital War. His latest book (with Matthew Ford) is Radical War: Data, Attention & Control in the Twenty-First Century.