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Digitally witnessable war from pereklychka to propaganda: Unfolding Telegram communication during Russia’s war in Ukraine

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The witnessing of wars is being transformed by digital platforms. In this article, the authors empirically investigate and develop the novel approach to the study of witnessing, in particular the non-institutionalized form of inconspicuous digital witnessing which thrives in platform communities in the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine. By empirically examining communication practices on Telegram, a highly popular platform in Ukraine, the article explores the ways in which online platforms enable the rise of inconspicuous witnessing. Using a mixed-method approach, the authors trace the changes in digital witnessing practices in the beginning and during different periods of the Russian occupation, by investigating over 2,000 messages from a specific Telegram channel with over 150,000 users devoted to one occupied Ukrainian city. By identifying a number of changes in the analysed Telegram chat communication practices over time, they propose an empirically-grounded concept of the digitally witnessable war that acknowledges the critical polyvocality of contemporary war witnessing practices.
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This is a post-print version of the article published in Media, Culture & Society and
accessible via the following link:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/17506352241255890
To cite this article:
Bareikytė, M. & M. Makhortykh, (2024). Digitally witnessable war from pereklychka to
propaganda: Unfolding Telegram communication during Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Media, War & Conflict (online first). doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352241255890
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Digitally witnessable war from pereklychka to propaganda: Unfolding Telegram
communication during Russia’s war in Ukraine
Miglė Bareikytė and Mykola Makhortykh,
Abstract: The witnessing of wars is being transformed by digital platforms. In this article, the
authors empirically investigate and develop the novel approach to the study of witnessing, in
particular the non-institutionalized form of inconspicuous digital witnessing which thrives in
platform communities in the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine. By empirically examining
communication practices on Telegram, a highly popular platform in Ukraine, the article
explores the ways in which online platforms enable the rise of inconspicuous witnessing.
Using a mixed-method approach, the authors trace the changes in digital witnessing
practices in the beginning and during different periods of the Russian occupation, by
investigating over 2,000 messages from a specific Telegram channel with over 150,000
users devoted to one occupied Ukrainian city. By identifying a number of changes in the
analysed Telegram chat communication practices over time, they propose an
empirically-grounded concept of the digitally witnessable war that acknowledges the critical
polyvocality of contemporary war witnessing practices.
Introduction
Walter Benjamin highlighted how technological developments change the historically
conditioned medium of perception by shaping experiences and processes of
meaning-making (e.g. Benjamin, 1939). One of these changes involves witnessing the
embodied perception and mediatization of societally significant events and the exchange of
experiences with regard to them (Allan, 2013: 108; Ellis, 2009). The datafication and
platformization of human experience has enabled increasingly dynamic forms of witnessing,
including citizen witnessing or remote audience sensing (Awan, 2021). Today, social media
platforms and messengers allow users to constantly generate and engage with various
forms of war-related content (Ford and Hoskins, 2022), thus shaping how wartime violence
is represented and perceived.
The importance of digital witnessing for contemporary warfare and post-war justice has
generated substantial scholarly interest in conceptualizing the link between digital media and
witnessing. One of the latest conceptual contributions is ‘arrested war’ (Hoskins and
O’Loughlin, 2015). The concept suggests contrary to the initial belief in the democratic
nature of digital media technologies that traditional media, state and military institutions
have largely appropriated contemporary war-related witnessing and meaning-making in the
digital sphere. However, we argue that the continuing rise of non-institutionalized forms of
digital witnessing the inconspicuous digital witnessing that thrives in platform communities
contributes to contemporary forms of witnessing and challenges the traditional power
relations that underlie the arrested war media ecosystem. It does this by transcending the
rigid distinction between witnesses and audiences of witnessing, and making such digital
witnessing simultaneously participatory, polarizing, unpredictable and more difficult to
appropriate by external actors as it mixes different experiences in one chat. Building on
recent work on witnessing in online environments (e.g. Awan, 2016; Chouliaraki, 2015; Ford
and Hoskins, 2022) and our empirical research on digital witnessing regarding Russia’s war
in Ukraine, we propose a concept of digitally witnessable war that acknowledges the
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possibility of a form of witnessing that is more polyvocal and less conventional than
institutional power-driven digital witnessing of war. We argue that this acknowledgement is
important for capturing the ongoing changes in mediatization of modern wars.
Our conceptual contribution emerges from an empirical investigation of social media
platforms that are crucial to contemporary digital forms of witnessing. We examine how the
rise of inconspicuous witnessing as part of digitally witnessable war is enabled by the use of
Telegram for witnessing Russia’s war in Ukraine. In contrast to Western Europe and
Northern America, where Telegram is often associated with extremist groups (e.g. white
supremacists or COVID deniers; Guhl and Davey, 2020; Schwarzenegger and Wagner,
2023), in Ukraine, the platform has become the main digital medium for formal and informal
communication following the Russian invasion in 2022 (Romaniuk, 2022). Telegram’s
affordances combine messenger (e.g. individual/group chats) and social media (e.g.
subscription to information channels) functionalities with limited content moderation and wide
access to various channels and groups, resulting in diverse communication practices related
to the war. Examples of these practices range from new forms of visceral propaganda by
pro-Kremlin Telegram channels (Romaniuk, 2023), to the discursive dehumanization
(Makhortykh and González-Aguilar, 2023) and pornification of war (Hoskins and Shchelin,
2023), to the capturing and sharing of everyday experiences at the frontline by soldiers
(Hoskins and Shchelin, 2023) to civilian broadcasting of and documenting everyday war
events (Nazaruk, 2022).
To examine how diverse user practices constitute the phenomenon of digitally witnessable
war, we empirically and systematically examine data from the Telegram chat of one of the
large Ukrainian cities occupied by the Russian army in 2022. This examination allows us to
actualize the conceptual notion of arrested war by exploring diverse formats of bottom-up
communication during the current war in Ukraine and, reflecting on today’s forms of digital
witnessing through a form of inconspicuous war witnessing that thrives in platforms, is
participatory, polarizing, uncertain and difficult to operationalize in its entirety. Using a
mixed-method approach combining qualitative content analysis, descriptive statistics and
close reading, we trace the content and change in witnessing practices at the beginning and
during different periods of the Russian occupation, and aim to answer the following research
questions: What types of user communication practices are prevalent in the context of
inconspicuous war witnessing on Telegram? How do these practices change over time? And,
finally, what are the implications of these practices for the digitally witnessable war
ecosystem?
Digital witnessing
Historically, the concept of witnessing has been related to the specific areas of law, theology
and suffering (Bell, 2021; Peters, 2001: 710–711). After the Second World War, it was
applied to studying the representation and perception of mass atrocities, prominently the
Holocaust and the testimonies of survivors (e.g. Apel, 2002; Consonni and Nord, 2023;
Goodman and Meyers, 2012; Pollin-Galay, 2018). With the continuous mediatization of mass
atrocities in recent decades, the concept of witnessing has been increasingly adopted in the
field of Media and Communication Studies to investigate how meaning-making in the context
of suffering is influenced by the development of media technologies (e.g. Frosh and
Pinchevski, 2009; Henig and Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2022; Kyriakidou, 2015).
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The act of witnessing can be broken down into three main components: an actor witnessing,
a representation of the event being witnessed and an audience exposed to the
representation (Schankweiler et al., 2018: 2). This breakdown facilitates adapting the
concept of witnessing to different contexts which can vary depending on the actors involved
and the ways they represent the witnessed events. In the context of the war, such variation
can be rather broad, with witnessing actors including both perpetrators and victims of
violence, and representations varying from personal records (e.g. war diaries) to publicly
broadcasted materials (e.g. war documentaries). Together, all three components produce a
particular political aesthetic of witnessing (Chouliaraki, 2010). At the same time, according to
Kyriakidou (2015: 217), contemporary mediatized witnessing collapses the boundaries
between witnesses, audiences and experienced events, as audiences witness events,
victims of these events and their discursive representations through the media.
The rise of digital technologies further transforms the concept of witnessing by enabling new
formats and practices for sharing and engaging with experiences of suffering. Today’s
witnessing increasingly occurs in group chats and on digital platforms and is shaped by
tweets, video feeds, memes and images from satellites and war drones. Traditional (war)
witnesses soldiers, humanitarian workers, or journalists are thus joined by other groups
of witnesses directly affected by the violence. These ‘citizen witnesses’ and other types of
witnesses, including activists and soldiers, use digital tools and platforms to produce and
present their testimonies to transnational platform audiences and contribute to the ubiquity,
high number and diverse forms of digital witnessing (Allan, 2013; Hoskins and O’Loughlin,
2010).
Representation is crucial for realizing the functions of witnessing and, for this aim, it is
essential that ‘witness and listener must share a faith in their relationship’ (Hoskins and
O’Loughlin, 2010: 69). The need for a testimony to be trusted embeds witnessing in existing
power relations, which have traditionally favoured institutionally privileged groups of
witnesses (Chouliaraki, 2015). However, the ongoing conditions of the ‘post-truth’ media
environment (Kalpokas, 2019) and ‘crisis of representation’ (Nöth, 2003), together with the
growing presence of digital disinformation and participatory propaganda campaigns
(O’Shaughnessy, 2019; Wanless and Berk, 2019) contribute to the reinforcement of
diagonalist movements (Callison and Slobodian, 2021). Under these circumstances,
conspiratorial forms of digital witnessing, which decentre witnessing as a practice that aims
to secure ‘truth from facts’ (Peters, 2001: 709) towards generalized confusion, uncertainty
and ‘constant vigilance’ (Kyriakidou, 2015) are on the rise.
One of our premises for conducting an empirical analysis of communicative practices of
digital witnessing on social media platforms such as Telegram is that digital witnessing is
medium-specific and situated, requiring empirically informed conceptualization to update
contemporary forms of digital witnessing. This is because specific platform affordances and
policies determine what types of content can be shared through the platform, and what forms
of user interaction are enabled by the platform’s content moderation mechanisms. Also,
while established forms of witnessing such as journalistic war reporting remain influential
and important, growing distrust towards mainstream media and increasing news avoidance
around the world (Coster, 2022; Ford and Hoskins, 2022) amplify the significance of
bottom-up witnessing practices, which require conceptually informed empirical investigation
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to meaningfully grasp their diversity and specificity. This diversity of form, content and types
of interaction complicates the ability of elite actors, such as professional journalists, military
officials or politicians, to appropriate war sensing (Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2015),
diversifying war witnessing and demanding its situated analysis.
We argue that, together, the three features that characterize inconspicuous war witnessing
the change in the witnessing power dynamics, the increased uncertainty of witnessing and
its medium specificity stress the importance of empirical research of witnessing practices,
on platforms which until now remain outside the main focus of media and communication
scholarship. Such analyses are important for a more nuanced understanding of digital
witnessing, addressing individual agency in the digitally witnessable war ecosystem, and
offering diverse and popular perspectives on war (e.g. Chouliaraki, 2015).
There are several other limitations in the existing scholarship on digital witnessing. Much of
the scholarship on digital witnessing focuses on visual aspects of witnessing (e.g.
Andén-Papadopoulos, 2013; Chouliaraki, 2006, 2009), or is based on either general or
illustrative descriptions of phenomena (Awan, 2016; Ford and Hoskins, 2022; Kyriakidou,
2015). Digital witnessing of war tends to focus on conflicts directly involving Western troops
or the public (Chouliaraki, 2015), whereas wars without such involvement receive less
attention. Also, there is still limited understanding of how digital platforms are used by
ordinary citizens in war zones: most studies focus either on individual professional actors
(e.g. journalists) or disinformation campaigns of states and their media infrastructures, such
as trolls and bots (Pomerantsev and Weiss, 2014; Tsyrenzhapova and Woolley, 2021;
Woolley, 2022). In other words, there is little research that points to the agency of people
(Golovchenko et al., 2018) under attack and their use of digital media to document and
share data and information about ongoing atrocities.
In the case of Ukraine, the majority of studies on war representation and witnessing until
recently have focused on Twitter (e.g. Garcia and Cunanan-Yabut, 2022; Makhortykh and
Lyebyedyev, 2015; Pantti, 2019; Turska-Kawa and Stępień-Lampa, 2023) or VK (e.g.
Gaufman, 2015; Kozachenko, 2019; Makhortykh and Sydorova, 2017; Urman and
Makhortykh, 2022), while Telegram has remained relatively understudied. However, a few
recent studies have demonstrated the particular importance of Telegram for communicating
about the war following the 2022 Russian invasion (e.g. Nazaruk, 2022; Ptaszek et al., 2023;
Sopolova et al., 2023). Some examples of such communication practices include the use of
Telegram for war remembrance (Hoskins and Shchelin, 2023; Shumylovych et al., 2022),
journalistic war reporting (Pavlik, 2022; Ptaszek et al., 2023) or spreading disinformation and
hate speech (Makhortykh and González-Aguilar, 2023; Sopolova et al., 2023; Vanetik et al.,
2023). However, qualitative research on Telegram communication practices, both in Ukraine
in general, and during wartime in particular, remains scarce.
Methodology
The increase in popularity of Telegram in Ukraine following the large-scale Russian invasion
in 2022 is attributed to several factors. One of the key reasons is the limited availability of
information from other sources (e.g. traditional journalistic media) due to military censorship
and the inability of journalists to access many war areas (Speri, 2023). Under these
circumstances, two-thirds of the Ukrainian population use Telegram to produce and share
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war-related information (Romaniuk, 2022), including image, text and video-based evidence
of atrocities and destruction. The diversity of Telegram’s user base distinguishes it from
platforms such as Instagram or Twitter, which target more specific audiences, or messengers
such as Signal and WhatsApp, which are primarily used for one-to-one or small-group
communication.
In our study, we focused on the use of Telegram to empirically investigate war witnessing in
an Eastern Ukrainian city which is one of the largest cities captured and destroyed by Russia
in 2022 and the site of particularly heavy battles resulting in multiple war crimes. Our
research began during the Data Sprint ‘Russia’s War in Ukraine’ in December 2022, when
the Telegram Archive, an initiative started at the Centre for Urban History in Lviv at the
beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 (Nazaruk, 2022), was
first opened to a limited group of researchers. Telegram Archive documents selected
Telegram channels and groups, and prepared ‘an archive that will help us talk about war
when we can talk about it in the past tense’ (Center for Urban History, 2023). In our analysis,
we used archived data from one specific Telegram channel with over 150,000 users devoted
to the situation in the aforementioned Ukrainian city.1
Using the Telegram Archive, which ensured data integrity, and a TG search tool developed
and adjusted for the data sprint by the researchers from the Ukrainian experimental research
group to filter and search the data, we exported a CSV file with a selection of Telegram posts
for qualitative analysis. To examine user communication practices and illustrate changes in
these practices, we extracted data for three days: one in March, one in July and one in
October. In selecting these days, we prioritized ordinary dates when no major war
developments occurred in the city (e.g. particularly brutal Russian shelling or visits of
Russian officials) and, in this way, focused on everyday communication practices within the
channel.
As a result of our sampling strategy, we ended up with a sample of 2,298 Telegram posts
written primarily in Ukrainian and Russian (with occasional posts in English, Belarusian and
Polish). Both authors coded the whole sample individually and then consensus-coded the
disagreements to ensure that these were resolved. One author, who is a non-native speaker
of Ukrainian and Russian, facilitated the analysis with the help of Google Translate and
DeepL, while the other author is a native speaker of Russian and Ukrainian. In addition, we
wrote memos to evaluate the messages posted on selected dates. We then used descriptive
statistics to analyse the change in messages over time and close reading to illustrate the
thematic content of the selected messages. A selection of examples has been used to
describe and illustrate the emerging changes in messages below.
Our qualitative analysis resulted in an initial codebook of categories based on the key
communication practice themes (Braune and Clarke, 2021), which we continuously adjusted
during the coding process.
1We avoid reporting the name of the city due to safety reasons as the city currently remains under
Russian occupation. The quotes appearing in the article are not attributed to specific Telegram users
due to the same reasons; these quotes are translated into English and rephrased in the process to
exclude potentially sensitive information.
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The resulting categories were non-exclusive i.e. the same post could be coded as
belonging to several categories, such as ‘searching for the information’ and ‘making
narratives’. The final codebook consisted of the following categories:
• Chat communication: messages about chat policies, communication rules, admin bans,
direct messages to other chat participants;
• Spatial attribution: short messages with addresses and locations of specific places in the
occupied city;
• Critique: judgements that involve negative critique of others (e.g. Russians or negative
judgements of other chat members), negative critique of meanings (e.g. propaganda),
cynical critique (e.g. in terms of pragmatic evaluations of the war) and positive critique (e.g.
about the Ukrainian side of the war as well as positive judgements of other chat members);
• Expression of emotion: messages that contain strong emotional reactions, either without
specifying the subject matter (e.g. swear words), or expressing emotional states in direct
terms (e.g. ‘I feel sad’);
• Filler: messages without direct semantic meaning (e.g. ‘oi’);
• Searching for the information: messages asking for specific information (e.g. condition of
people, specific infrastructure objects) in the occupied city;
• Making narratives: messages that try to make sense and represent present or past
events in the form of narrativized statements.
It is important to note several limitations of our research. First of all, extracting Telegram
messages from an archive made it difficult to understand the sequence of messages since
the usual user interface was unavailable. However, the experience of non-linear
conversation was similar to the actual experience of going through the chat of a large
Telegram channel. Another limitation was our choice of material: we analysed a single chat
for only three days, which raises questions about possible selection bias. However, it would
require substantial resources to expand the sample without relying on automated analysis,
and limiting the ability for in-depth understanding of complex conversations which are often
loaded with emotion and irony.
In this analysis, we build on the conceptual framework described above, which emphasizes
the importance of situated, empirically grounded and media-specific research in the study of
digital witnessing, and provides an empirical account of the emergence of inconspicuous
witnessing facilitated by digital platforms. Our research was guided by a mixed method
analysis of users’ communication practices in order to inductively code, categorize and
compare the selected messages over the different days of the war. In this way, we were able
to understand both what the users of the analysed channel were discussing and how their
communication practices had changed over time. The analysis enabled us to produce an
empirically-based and medium-specific concept of inconspicuous digital witnessing during
the war in Ukraine, enacted by those people who were direct witnesses of the war.
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Empirical findings
Functionality of Telegram communication
We began the analysis of empirical findings by examining the distribution of the
communication practices associated with Telegram chat messages over the three days of
data collection. Figure 1 shows the substantial differences between March (i.e. the period of
intense fighting in the city) and July/October (the period of occupation). While we examine
these differences in more detail in the next section, in March we observed the prevalence of
messages related to searching for information, documenting damage to the city and the
emergence of the first set of rules governing chat communication practices. During the
period of occupation, the focus of communication practices shifted towards various forms of
critique and narratives, as well as the expression of strong emotional reactions. Interestingly,
we observed little difference in the general distribution of communication categories between
July and October.
Figure 1. Distribution of chat messages with a particular category (non-exclusive): (1) C:
critique; (2) CC: chat communication; (3) EM: expression of emotion; (4) F: filler; (5) MN:
making narratives; (6) SA: spatial attribution; and (7) SI: searching for information.
After examining the aggregated categories of communication practices, we also looked at
cases when chat messages combined several different categories (e.g. the case message
could simultaneously express a critique of a specific issue and include requests for
information). Figure 2 shows that the first day, in March, was characterized by the
prevalence of a distinct set of single categories. In July and October, the semantic
complexity of messages increases and the multiple categories begin to be combined in the
same message. Such combinations are particularly common in the category of critique,
which is often related to both the creation of narratives and the expression of emotions. It
highlights the increasingly antagonistic nature of the communication practices on Telegram
as the Russian occupation continued.
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Figure 2. Distribution of chat messages depending on the combination of categories for
individual messages (exclusive). The combinations are structured in alphabetical order
based on the individual functionalities: (1) C: critique; (2) CC: chat communication; (3) EM:
expression of emotion; (4) F: filler; (5) MN: making narratives; (6) SA: spatial attribution; (7)
SI: searching for information. For instance, C_EM_MN category is made of messages
including three categories: critique, expression of emotion and making narratives.
The following outline of the results of analysis illustrates how communication on Telegram
forms a particular kind of digital war witnessing inconspicuous witnessing that differs
from the arrested war (Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2015) or citizen (Allan, 2013) forms of war
witnessing. Taking place in a platform environment, inconspicuous war witnessing differs
structurally from both institutionalized media environments and citizen witnessing formats
that participate in the traditional media ecosystem. Such structural medium specificity has
both formal and semantic implications for how the war in Ukraine is witnessed on Telegram,
allowing users to collaboratively share information about the ongoing destruction, to
challenge and criticize each other, to engage in highly emotional and insulting exchanges, or
to discuss what kind of information should be shared at all. These forms and content of
communication practices would not be accessible in the ecosystem of the arrested war
media (or would be managed in the comments or readers’ letters sections of media
organizations), which, although increasingly utilizing citizen witnesses’ experiences, focuses
on definitive and coherent packages of information rather than the emerging, contradictory
and messy communication practices we see on Telegram.
Day 1: Searching for situated information
Discussions in March i.e. the time of the intensive combat actions in the city consisted
mainly of messages requesting information or providing spatial attributions. The messages
that requested information usually asked about destruction in a certain area of the city or if
someone had information about relatives. The following message is a typical example of the
category ‘searching for information’: ‘Maybe someone knows how the situation is on street
X? Today we cannot connect to our relatives.’
In contrast, messages with the spatial attribution functionality mainly documented the
damage to the city, usually in the form of very short messages containing an image or a
video of the destruction and an address. Examples of such messages include ‘Area X, flew
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to my yard’ or ‘Street X house number Y, no roof’. In this way, local witnesses provided direct
evidence to each other and contributed to the memorialization of the war.
Both ‘spatial attribution’ and ‘seeking for information’ categories constituted the core of the
so-called pereklychka. In Ukrainian, pereklychka describes a specific user-based, bottom-up
practice of communicating: searching for and producing digital, social media-based visual
and textual information about activities in the immediate surroundings during the war. Such a
concept became widespread following the large-scale Russian invasion, when civilians
received limited information from (and in) the war zone and had difficulty communicating with
their relatives or navigating the war zone due to intense Russian bombardment of civilian
infrastructure such as the power grid. Under these circumstances, people get involved in
pereklychka by trying to find and share information that is not available in official media and
state channels. The communication practices observed in the channel at the beginning of
the war correspond to the broader cultural practice of pereklychka in Ukraine.
Another prominent practice during this period was ‘chat communication’, including the
negotiation of the rules of communication, such as the type of content that could be
published or methods for dealing with false claims. The messages ranged from calls to stop
publishing information about the destruction because it was likely to be used by the enemy
to correct artillery strikes, to the disclaimers that some information was difficult to verify, to
calls to report fake material.
The ‘chat communication’ category was substantially present in March, following
communication practices aligned with pereklychka. This shift highlights that Telegram users
increasingly questioned the exchange of information about the war events on the ground,
raising awareness among each other that some forms of witnessing (e.g. documenting the
damage in the city with images and videos) can be life-threatening (for instance, by helping
the enemy to readjust its shelling targets), or contribute to the spread of false information.
The emergence of such critical discussions in the first weeks of the war shows that Ukrainian
Telegram users were very much aware that pereklychka, and digital communication in
general, is not a neutral practice of information exchange but a critical epistemic practice that
involves the habitual questioning of shared information. This has led to new communication
practices related to the very content of the messages shared in the channel, with the aim of
promoting awareness of self-control in the dissemination of war-related information.
Interestingly, the dissemination of information was questioned without much emotion or
criticism, two types of practices which became more common during the later periods of
analysis. The reason for these emotionalized and critical practices being less common in
March may be the shock of the first days of the Russian invasion and the limited capacities
for processing and communicating information at the time. Some users in the chat may have
faced life-threatening situations in the city attacked by Russia and, under these
circumstances, the witnessing practices revolved more around recording evidence of
destruction and trying to find helpful information, and less around affective reactions and the
assignation of blame.
Day 2: The making of narratives and emerging critique
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Digital witnessing in July consisted of semantically complex messages: critical, dissenting,
narrative-based and emotionally expressive, which stood in sharp contrast to the
pereklychka-based messages in March. Conversations in July include a decreased number
of exchanges about chat communication and a sharp decrease in messages that seek
information and share spatial attributions.
Divergent critical communication practices pragmatic, negative, positive were expressed
during the day in July. While some of the practices represented a positive form of critical
judgement, such as commemorations of fallen soldiers or presentations of cultural initiatives
supporting Ukrainian soldiers, most were negative and pragmatically critical.
July’s negative forms of critique included criticism directed at both internal and external
subjects: Russians, Ukrainian law enforcement and educational institutions who ‘sold out’ to
Russia, looting neighbours, citizens of Ukraine who had not left the city after the occupation,
and other chat members. When critical communication regarding the city emerged that
negatively judged its pre-occupation environment, emphasizing the poor living and
environmental conditions caused by its factories, it was met with a counter-critique: ‘And now
I’m ready to breathe this plant, just not Russia . . . and these ‘liberators’ killed more kids then
the plant.’ In addition to the negative critique, a pragmatic form of critique stressed structural
reasons and how they force people to stay in the occupied territories, including statements
that old people cannot leave the occupied territories and therefore do not necessarily
support the occupation regime by staying in the city. Such pragmatic critique often
encountered a direct pushback: ‘The parents are to blame for not taking their children out.
And there’s no need to talk about bedridden relatives here.’ Some of the users even felt
compassion with the looters and described them as people who find themselves in extremely
bad conditions or want to provide their children ‘at least some joy’ and should not be
critiqued too much. Others attempted to balance the negative critique, as in this example of
the city’s environment:
Exactly, despite the factories. There are so many children with asthma and lung
diseases [due to the factories]; according to statistics, [the city] has the highest mortality rate
from cancer in Ukraine. I didn’t say anything good about the rashists; there’s clearly nothing
to thank them for. But there is also nothing good in the factories that operated in violation of
all environmental standards.
One widely criticized narrative revolved around an image shared in the chat that showed
families with Russian flags. These families, adults and children, appeared to be Ukrainians
who had recently gone to Russia. This image was both negatively criticized and questioned
as inauthentic and staged for the camera. Again, the critical judgments went in different
directions: the act was criticized as ‘robbing children of their future’, images were criticized
as staged, but also judged as ‘pragmatic’, as ‘a reason to leave for those who could not’
claiming that these families had nowhere else to go.
On the second day of analysis, there was a significant shift in the communication practices,
exemplified by the emergence of different critical statements and narratives. Participants
began to produce critical and conflicting narratives, and express their emotions rather than
trying to understand who was killed or what was destroyed and where. This day illustrated
the gradual emergence of dialogic, narrative-making and critical communication practices in
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the chat on the one hand, and the disappearance of the intense attention to immediate
information about the conditions of people and places on the other.
Day 3: increased emotionalization
On the third day, in October, the discussions became particularly emotional. Emotionalized
digital witnessing, often framed by expletives, became increasingly visible in the messages
about militaristic slogans, descriptions of experiences of bombing, narratives about
humanitarian aid or people remaining in the city, judgments about other chat members and
Russia, as exemplified in this critical, emotionally charged narrative: ‘Rashist, you mutilate
children and rape women on our land. Fuck off or we’ll cut your throat, you Putin creature.’ In
October, several months after the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the narratives of
nostalgia and hope began to appear, expressed in the desire to return to the city once it is
under Ukrainian control and to swim in the Azov Sea: ‘[The city], hold on dear! We will
definitely come back! Everything will be Ukraine!’, shared one chat member.
One of the topics discussed that day was the ethics of using the Russian language for
communication: is it acceptable or not to use it, both on Telegram and in general? One
example, illustrative of the emotionally charged debate culture, dealt with the Russian
language issue:
Hey, you cheesehead, let’s say this to the ZSU soldiers, ask them which one of them
speaks Russian? You stupid bastard, you should be imprisoned for the language issue, it
was on such fools and on such topics that these LPR and DPR were organized because the
morons, because of their stupidity and greed, ruined the regions that are equally Ukraine.
While the third day’s discussions continued to produce critical forms of witnessing, they also
provided an increased amount of emotionally charged messages and although massively
reduced in numbers messages of information seeking, spatial attribution and with stories
from official channels and traditional media.
The communicative practices we explored during three days of war in 2022 became
semantically complex over the course of the war. The first day’s communication consists
predominantly of short messages with specific goals aimed at finding and sharing necessary
information about ongoing local destruction, also known as pereklychka; the second day
consists of semantically complex practices with increasingly critical and narrative-based
messages that include pragmatic, negative and positive judgments about local and external
subjects; the third day continues to provide messages that are critical and narrative-based,
but also increasingly emotional and derogatory. While all these communicative practices
negotiate, critique and determine how the politics of violence and knowledge are
experienced and represented by the members of a Telegram channel, the discussion
becomes increasingly engaging, emotional and personalized over time. This points to the
distinct, inconspicuous, bottom-up witnessing practices that are constantly emerging on
platforms, shaping and shifting not only the content and concerns but also the form of the
debate.
Discussion and conclusions
13
In this article, we examined and described user communication practices and their change
on Telegram as one example of contemporary digital war witnessing: inconspicuous war
witnessing. We perceive Telegram messenger as one of the key contemporary digital spaces
where inconspicuous war witnessing takes place. We argue that Telegram, as the key digital
communication platform in Ukraine, enables researchers to empirically investigate digital war
witnessing practices while acknowledging the situated, medium-specific character of
witnessing. Furthermore, the empirical investigation of Telegram’s role in the context of war
witnessing is of particular relevance at a time where there are extensive debates in Ukraine
(e.g. Chaika, 2024) regarding the potential ban of the platform or introduction of additional
security measures for its use, due to the risks of extensive abuse of Telegram for spreading
disinformation and Russian propaganda.
Our conceptualization of inconspicuous war witnessing emerges from critical reflection on
the insights generated in the course of empirical research on Telegram data and long-term
engagement with war representation on a broad range of digital platforms. By investigating
how communicative practices changed over time in a specific city-based Telegram channel,
we carried out situated and media-specific research, which is crucial for investigating
contemporary forms of digital witnessing. We observed the shift from short messages with
specific goals to increasingly complex, emotional and multi-functional statements, and the
continuous rise in critical and emotional communication practices as the war went on. This
dynamic resulted in qualitatively different forms of what we call inconspicuous witnessing:
polyvocal, polarizing, participatory and uncertain due to its emergent nature in the bottom-up
and situated chat.
We argue that inconspicuous witnessing is different from the arrested war ecosystem or the
accountability-focused concept of citizen witnessing. Inconspicuous witnessing is not mainly
focused on an event or an incident, but constitutes its own emergent conversational dynamic
that includes stories, insults, critiques, pereklychka practices that persist in the situated
channels and change over time. This diversity of digital war witnessing results in the specific
formation of inconspicuous war witnessing, where the representation of mass violence goes
beyond traditional media platforms or media events and becomes part of everyday digital
communication. We argue that an analysis of inconspicuous witnessing as a distinct
phenomenon goes beyond the appropriation of war representation by mainstream actors,
and is crucial to avoid displacing the agency of digital witnesses (Kyriakidou, 2015). The
concept allows capturing the changing roles of different actors involved in the act of
witnessing (i.e. the actual witnesses and the audiences) and problematizes the
differentiation between these actors that was common in research on war witnessing in the
analogue era. Furthermore, the concept allows for the revisiting of the very structure of the
act of war witnessing, highlighting both its polyvocality and uncertainty, but also the tendency
of the process of witnessing to evolve over time in terms of what is witnessed and how this
takes place.
The above-mentioned changes are due to the changes in the agency of inconspicuous
witnesses that are realized via platformized communication practices such as Telegram
groups and channels, and used by communities directly witnessing ongoing atrocities to
document, share and process their experiences with each other, which can also constitute a
form of resistance to oppression in times of war (e.g. of the occupying forces). In this way,
inconspicuous witnessing goes beyond mediated citizen witnessing by producing content
14
that is shared on Telegram channels and groups, such as neighbourhood chats that are not
mediated either by traditional media of the arrested war ecosystem or by citizen witnesses.
Such inconspicuous witnessing does not directly correspond to democratizing and subjective
citizen journalism, or to the breaking news type of live footage shown on the global news
channels (Allan, 2013: 92–94, 103). Instead, it emerges from bottom-up everyday
communication within specific user groups, sharing and discussing information about the
ongoing war without the (or with less) involvement of traditional journalistic bodies or citizen
witnesses.
We argue that our conceptual, empirically informed contribution has several implications for
the current conceptualizations of the digitally witnessable war ecosystem that is, how
contemporary wars are witnessed and mediatized in particular regarding the distinct
features of inconspicuous war witnessing that shape the digitally witnessable war
ecosystem.
Inconspicuous war witnessing shifts the power dynamics from the arrested war ecosystem
by transcending the boundary between witnesses and audiences, with both sides
contributing to the processes of witnessing by co-interpreting online testimonies in specific
media. In line with the concept of the connective turn (Hoskins, 2011), our analysis
demonstrates how Telegram users, such as direct witnesses and audiences, interact by
constantly engaging through comments, which range from discussions of individual witness
experiences to the establishment of rules of what is or is not appropriate to represent. Under
these circumstances, in the same messenger chat, we can find direct witnesses exchanging
their experiences with each other and with external observers, looking for ways to satisfy
their knowledge needs, including extreme and personalized perceptions of the war (Allan,
2013, quoting Taubert (2012): 103; Kyriakidou, 2015). At its core, digital witnessing becomes
‘collaborative, participatory, somewhere between the subjectivity of one and the overview of
many’ (Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2010: 62). But, as our empirical research has shown, it also
makes such witnessing unpredictable and potentially polarizing as it mixes different war
experiences into one chat and allows for the emergence of multiple forms of critique.
Furthermore, inconspicuous witnessing as such is highly uncertain and volatile.The
non-linear nature and the instability and participatory nature of inconspicuous witnessing
resist a fixed narrative about the war, making it more difficult for institutionalized actors,
including traditional media, to appropriate it for the purposes of stable narrative formation,
propaganda, or even disinformation. However we acknowledge that inconspicuous
witnessing practices can still be subverted, distorted and used by propaganda, especially in
the less top-down manner of participatory propaganda as well as constrained and controlled
by digital platforms or protocols (Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2015; Pötzsch, 2015; Wu and
Montgomery, 2019). Furthermore, the non-linearity of inconspicuous witnessing not only
produces digital evidence (Al-Hlou et al., 2022) but also contributes to the epistemic
uncertainties that can decrease trust in digital witnessing, in particular considering the rise of
war-related online disinformation (e.g. Ford and Hoskins, 2022).
Together, these features of inconspicuous witnessing profoundly change war witnessing and
result in a new form of war mediatization, which we propose calling a digitally witnessable
war. Inconspicuous digital witnessing produces and shares digital data via
non-institutionalized and often locally situated regional, city or neighbourhood digital
15
channels. It actualizes the notion of arrested war by showing how contemporary digital
witnessing goes beyond institutional war appropriation, and involves situated witnesses
whose experiences and representations are only partially shaped by institutional practices,
and often are not represented in public media channels. We are not criticizing traditional
media channels for not being representative enough, but rather arguing for the importance of
recognizing the coexistence of different formats, channels and witness/audience
relationships in an age of intensified information production and datafication. Such
recognition is important for evaluating new possibilities, but also risks (e.g. regarding the
spread of disinformation or reiteration of the language of hate) posed by platforms in the
context of war mediatization.
An important constituent of such coexistence is that not only do global news audiences
demand new experiences from first-hand witnesses to satisfy their ever-growing information
needs (Allan, 2013; Chouliaraki, 2006), but that direct witnesses also demand information
and new experiences from other direct witnesses while using digital platforms and
messengers. While such digital witnessing is intrinsically embedded in the process of
datafication and is medium specific, it does not necessarily become appropriated by external
actors, as the conversations in the channel serve and can be understood primarily by its
culturally and spatially situated members. Thus, inconspicuous digital witnessing constitutes
an important part of the contemporary realm of digital war witnessing and extends the
arrested war framework to include non-institutionalized witness practices that have
implications for platform regulation as well as for further usage of platform (and thus users’)
data, including generative AI training models and their potential use for war representation.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article: Gefördert durch die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
(DFG) Projektnummer 262513311 SFB 1187 (Funded by the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) Project-ID 262513311
SFB 1187). Alfred Landecker Foundation provided financial support for the research time of
Dr. Makhortykh.
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