Ukraine war: TikToker becomes an influencer almost overnight

Marta Vasyuta used to be a regular 20-year-old Ukrainian who is on TikTok like many people of her age! Until last week, she posted videos from nights out, lip-synced to her favourite music, and had a few hundred followers.

 

Almost overnight, Marta became a TikTok influencer when she started posting videos from the conflict in Ukraine, garnering tens of millions of views. For many people on TikTok, particularly younger people, she’s become a key curator of news on the ground in Ukraine.

 

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Marta happened to be in the UK, visiting friends she met at university. As soon as Marta heard about the invasion, she started scrolling through Ukrainian channels on the Telegram messaging app, hugely popular in Ukraine.

 

People in Ukraine were using these channels to upload videos. Marta rummaged through the piles and began saving them. She then attempted to verify the videos by reviewing the relevant comments. She began uploading the videos to TikTok before falling asleep. She awoke the next morning to find that her TikTok videos had already received nine million views. Her videos have over 17 million views, and she now has 200,000 followers on Instagram.

 

According to Sam Gregory, the programme director of Witness, who looks at how social media is used during humanitarian crises, Marta became a TikTok influencer almost overnight, thanks to TikTok’s algorithm, which is aggressively topic-based. He said that the content is served to people based on their interests. If someone starts to show interest in Ukraine, they will get shown more content either from Ukraine or talking about Ukraine, he added.

 

Experts warn, however, that while TikTok can be a good place to find videos from the ground, the platform is also rife with misinformation. Marta acknowledges that verifying content can be difficult. Even if a video is from Ukraine and the people speak Ukrainian, it could still be from its long-running conflict in the east, which began in 2014. She also admits that she isn’t an expert in verifying videos. Some of the videos she’s shared have been verified as genuine by news organisations, including the BBC.

 

According to Marta, some people still would rather get their news from social media like her than from traditional news outlets. They don’t trust professional journalists or even verified sources. She believes that being a regular young woman from Ukraine makes her relatable to a wider audience.

 

Marta is currently stranded in the United Kingdom, but she has family in Ukraine and is concerned for their safety. However, she believes that by disseminating these videos, she is assisting the world, particularly younger audiences, in seeing what is truly happening on the ground. Marta speaks fluent Ukrainian, Russian and English.