Marta Vasyuta is a normal Ukrainian woman in her twenties.
And, like many of her peers, she uses TikTok.
She had a few hundred fans on the video-sharing app until last week. She lip-synced to her favorite songs and posted footage from her nights out.
She was in the UK visiting friends she’d met at university when Russia invaded Ukraine.
She watched stories of Russian bombers falling on Kyiv with fear.
Marta became a TikTok influencer almost overnight as a result of what she did next.
The videos she’s posted from the Ukraine conflict have racked up tens of millions of views since February 23. She’s become a crucial curator of news on the ground in Ukraine for many users on TikTok, particularly younger people.
“All I want people to understand is that Ukraine is not simply a Ukrainian problem; it is a crisis that affects everyone,” she says.
Marta is a native speaker of Ukrainian, Russian, and English.
She started scrolling through Ukrainian channels on the Telegram chat service as soon as she heard about the invasion. In Ukraine, Telegram is extremely popular.
These channels were being used by people in Ukraine to upload videos. Marta rummaged among the piles and began saving them.
“All the videos, all the news I found are entirely loaded up on my phone,” she says.
She then went about verifying the videos by reading the accompanying comments. “I could see individuals claiming that this was correct, that this is what was happening right now.”
She began uploading the films to TikTok before falling asleep.
“When I woke up this morning, I checked my TikTok and they had nine million views,” she explains.
Witness’s program director, Sam Gregory, studies how social media is used during humanitarian emergencies. TikTok’s algorithm, he claims, is aggressively topic-based.
He explains, “Content is served to you based on your interests, not your feed.”
“If you express an interest in Ukraine, you will be exposed to more content that is either from Ukraine or about Ukraine.”
It has aided folks like Marta in becoming TikTok influencers in a matter of days. Her videos have received over 17 million likes, and she now has over 200,000 followers on Instagram.
“Saying those numbers, I simply can’t fathom it,” she says as she reads the numbers off her phone, still in disbelief.
Experts warn, however, that while TikTok can be an excellent place to get footage from the ground, the platform is also plagued with misinformation.
Marta acknowledges that verifying content might be difficult. Even if a video is from Ukraine and the participants speak Ukrainian, it could still be from the country’s long-running conflict in the east, which began in 2014. She also admits that she isn’t an expert when it comes to authenticating videos.
Some of the videos she’s shared have been verified as authentic by news organizations, including the BBC.
Nonetheless, she believes that some people would prefer to acquire their news from social media sources such as herself rather than established news agencies.
“Some individuals don’t believe even professional journalists, let alone certified sources,” she continues.
Being an ordinary young woman from Ukraine, she believes, makes her more relevant to a larger audience.
“That increases their trust in me and in my movies,” she says.
Marta has relatives in Ukraine, and she is concerned about their well-being. However, she believes that by disseminating these recordings, she is allowing the rest of the world, particularly younger people, to witness what is really going on on the ground.
TikTok is her way of doing something now that she is stuck in the UK.
