13 ms·

Here comes the first TikTok war

223 points by CrankyBear 5y ago

Invictus0 5y ago
The first rule of decentralization is that it will eventually become centralized. We're already seeing version 0 of this with this morning's poorly implemented twitter livemap. I have no doubt that there are already defense contractors and private companies working to compile and package OSINT more reliably, completely, searchably, etc.
z58 5y ago
> The world was divided over who was telling the truth, and there was no way to tell (until “Baghdad Bob” fled). What? Nobody believed a word this man said.
- LandR 5y ago
  Yeah, the guy was a running joke / meme.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  His press briefings were widely played on international media, so someone believed. Because there's always someone gullible out there.
  - dtech 5y ago
    It was mostly because everyone thought it was hilarious
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    Nobody believed. They were broadcast because he was an official spokesman and because they were newsworthy in their surreal falseness. And the thing about him is that it was not an attempt to convince at all. He didn't think anyone would believe him; he couldn't have, because you could see it in his face. It was theatrical, showy, a performance, not a tedious attempt to lie. If he had a purpose beyond personal survival it was to humanise the regime as much as was possible. Really nobody thought it was true, but perhaps it was useful to them that it was optimistic, brazen, indomitable, even charming.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      That's like saying no one believed Sean Spicer. If someone has an official title, they'll find a believing audience.
      - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
        No, it's not, quite. I don't know if I can describe the difference without getting into politics which is apparently as unwelcome here as humour, but here goes. I am trying to be apolitical here. Baghdad Bob and Sean Spicer were really quite different. OK so you are partly right on two fronts. One, there was a Baghdad Bob moment right at the beginning, the whole "largest crowd ever PERIOD" rant, but even the presentation and the sentiment of that were rather different. It had no humour, it was an angry, hectoring, nasty, shouted attempt to bully and control. Two, he failed at it in spectacular fashion, which did lead to him being car-crash television in kind of the same way BB was, except he'd so severely soured his relationship with the press corps that you were watching a man slowly shrinking, rather than a man in control of the limelight. But Spicer also was just plain bad at his job, ignorant of history, incompetent, indifferent or unkind on screen to the people he spoke to, had terrible presentation, no theatrics, no presence, and he told humdrum, lazy, formulaic lies among his charmless distribution of the day-to-day humdrum stuff. Not comparable to BB. No one believed in him, but the press corps went there expecting to -- needing to -- be told the truth. Apolitically: a really bad press secretary, in short. Out of his depth. Trump's own press conferences were much more like Baghdad Bob in tone and approach; Trump inflated the truth, told huge, flowery, dramatic lies, timed press conferences to distract, and used one ridiculous hoax claim to distract from the fallout from another. Theatrics, performance. A weird amount of car-crash TV control from sheer, unprepared brinksmanship and BS (in the specific sense of indifference to the distinction between truth and lies). Like with Baghdad Bob, the truth was never being approached; it's not what the Trump press conferences were even for. I often felt a little sorry for Sarah Huckabee-Sanders, who to be clear told the same sort of lies as Spicer, but at least you could tell it made her uncomfortable to do it, and you could tell she cared about the press corps as people. She especially hated clearing up after a Trump press conference.
- bena 5y ago
  Yeah. That war was essentially broadcast on cable. And yeah, sure, access to the U.S. military came with caveats, but it was possible to be a non-affiliated reporter. But it's also not like the stories couldn't be cross-checked with, you know, reality. You could relatively trust the information coming from U.S. sources, because they coincided with reality. Iraq was doing their best to prevent information coming in and going out. That's why Baghdad Bob became a meme. Because his accounts were hilariously at odds with reality. He'd go on TV and claim the American forces were in full retreat while being frog marched out the studio by those forces. And it's also not like this is going to be the first conflict in the social media age.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  I genuinely thought... is this article satire, because I wasn't expecting that. The author isn't even too young to remember, so I am really puzzled by that claim. I, like everyone else, am glad that Baghdad Bob made it out alive, but I think we should have paid more attention to the idea that post-modern post-truth trolling could come from a source we expected to simply lie.
- jessaustin 5y ago
  Nobody believed a word this man said. Did he ever deny the presence of WMDs? Sometimes we must review our memories with the benefit of facts we learned later.
jedberg 5y ago
The openness of the raw video is great, but comes at a cost as well. For one, it will be hard to authenticate which videos are real and which are fake. While the curation of the news allowed the US to cherry pick only the "good stuff", it also let professional journalists vet the sources, and while they sometimes got it wrong, they were right far more often than a layperson.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Has anyone worked on a standard for authentication / attestation of video? I was mulling it in the context of deepfakes, and there's enough money in it that someone has to be working on the problem. E.g. Something that signs metadata (time, geolocation) at time of capture in a verifiable manner
  - ISL 5y ago
    Yes, but to my knowledge nobody has found a trusted solution. My guess is the best we can do is keychains of trust and the reputation that comes with them. Trustless authentication seems very difficult indeed.
  - r1b 5y ago
    Yes, see https://contentauthenticity.org/ https://contentauthenticity.org/
    - terr-dav 5y ago
      An expert's criticisms: https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/919-Closed-Standards.html https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/919-Cl... https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/920-Another-Bad-Example-from-CAI.html https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/920-An...
      - r1b 5y ago
        Thanks, I was skeptical too :) I especially liked the phrase “chain of blame”
ianlevesque 5y ago
Quite concerning to me is that this was seemingly coordinated between Putin and Xi, and TikTok is controlled by China. So Putin could very easily control what gets prioritized and goes viral or what quietly disappears from the narrative due to lack of reach, with just a call to his buddy.
- keewee7 5y ago
  There is no way that hundreds of Russian soldiers posted TikToks on the same morning revealing their locations and movements. This is coordinated propaganda. It's meant to both misdirect from actual large-scale Russian movements and to lower Ukrainian morale: "Look how easy and fun it is for us to invade you".
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > There is no way that hundreds of Russian soldiers posted TikToks on the same morning revealing their locations and movements. Don't overestimate them. It might be a sign of a problem with discipline or morale, or overconfidence.
- slg 5y ago
  The use of "TikTok" in that phrase is just a synecdoche for "social media that allows people to easily share video they filmed on their phones". If you can't see this video on TikTok, you can still see it on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
paxys 5y ago
The problem with "open source intelligence" is that there is too much of it from every side. Fact checkers are already working overtime debunking all the Tweets showing footage from previous wars or even video games (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/02/21/fact-check-arma-3-not-russia-ukraine-conflict-shown-viral-video/6879521001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/02/21/fac...). The author is also majorly discounting the role of intelligence services in debunking Putin's false flag operations. Weeks worth of updates on Russia's exact plans and motivations haven't come from TikTok but rather the US government and its allies. There is no substitute for spies and satellites.
gzer0 5y ago
"The Russian invasion of Ukraine will be the first war to fully play out on social media. There will be no possibility of controlling the information." I disagree with this statement. The Chinese government has taken a controlling stake in Bytedance [1], which is the subsidiary that owns TikTok. It could perhaps, then be possible, that China would "alter" the algorithm of TikTok users worldwide to sway public opinion? Push certain videos that fit a given narrative, and hide others that don't? Tiktok collects and shares your data more than any other social media app, and it is unclear where it goes [2]. This could become a dangerous tool. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/17/chinese-government-bytedance-tiktok/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/17/chinese... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/08/tiktok-shares-your-data-more-than-any-other-social-media-app-study.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/08/tiktok-shares-your-data-more...
- dustymcp 5y ago
  This war is absolutely televised, there was some disgusting scenes on r/ukraine, i was pretty amazed about following it all in real time..
- godelski 5y ago
  While I think you're right that China has the power to shift the information dominance through TikTok I don't think it changes the author's main thesis about OSINT. There are other platforms. If information starts getting censored then people will jump to other platforms to share it. There is definitely a dangerous tool here too because there already has been a lot of fake images and videos appearing. It's unclear who is posting these but it certainty generates a lot of noise for OSINT. While the former situations had low noise but high bias in the current situation we may just have so much noise that it is impossible to figure out what is real or not. Though I think it still changes things since military analysts have better tools and know corroborating information to sort through this noise more easily. But fake news travels faster than truth.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Sure, but real time info about military conflicts has been shared on the internet since the 1991 Gulf War, and perhaps earlier. TikTok is just the latest in a long series of platforms where such info has been shared, and as you say there's nothing really special about it, it's just the most popular right now.
qiskit 5y ago
> Unlike in the Iraq War, where the only cameras were controlled by a handful of journalists and the US military It was an interesting read, but the guy is about 10 years too late. Social media today is most definitely controlled by a few news companies and the state ( military/admin/etc ). Especially when it comes to important news events. > The Pentagon learned a lesson from that conflict, which was: Control the information and imagery at all costs. And they applied that lesson in the Iraq War. As if the pentagon didn't know before the vietnam war to control the information and imagery at all costs. Of course they did. They controlled all the information. It was the state that decided to end the war. Not journalists. Not the people. > And with social media, artificial intelligence and Internet-enabled crowd-sourcing, the intelligence will belong to the global public. And that changes everything. The state curated, censored and controlled social media changes everything? Don't think so.
- armchairhacker 5y ago
  social media is controlled by a few companies but not completely. If someone uploads X and i search for X i’m not 100% guaranteed but very likely to find what they uploaded. Especially if X is common and popular. See: alt-right media being widespread on Twitter, Quora, Reddit, Google, and sometimes even YouTube. Not only is that stuff not censored, it’s actively being shown to people who are not alt-right and aren’t looking for alt-right content
  - _dain_ 5y ago
    """alt-right""" content is censored to an absurd degree. (ask me how I know.)
    - animal_spirits 5y ago
      Next time you should just post a source to your claim instead of waiting for someone to ask you for the source
armchairhacker 5y ago
what’s going to happen when people upload videos of violent deaths and war crimes committed in real time? If not graphic stuff, videos of missiles and invading forces? Will TikTok / Facebook / Twitter censor these videos? Probably, but will they succeed? Will people watch the videos? Will they leak into mainstream sites? Right now despite the internet being notorious for violent and serious content, i think most mainstream sites are good at hiding it and most people definitely aren’t looking for it. But this is the first major conflict outside of the middle east / Africa (aka the first major conflict people are really paying attention to) where we have widespread social media and 4K video. If anything, i only hope that it will make the war more real and serious to people, so it will prevent further atrocities in this war and avoid wars in the future.
tomatotomato37 5y ago
While the ability of the internet to debunk falseflag operations is great, I feel like this is overstating it's usefulness for tracking the chaos of actual war. Most of the civilian videos I've seen so far seem to be more visually exciting shots of distant explosions in urban areas over any attempt to focus on what is shooting or is getting shot at. Contrary to public belief, knowing an artillery shell landed somewhere near a preschool/hospital/whatever ranks pretty low in actual tactical significance.
jim-jim-jim 5y ago
The Syria war (and its spillover into Iraq) was incredibly well documented. Then the major platforms took a stance against "extremism" and "disinformation" and removed heaps of invaluable footage.
keewee7 5y ago
Russian military videos on TikTok are coordinated propaganda and misinformation. There is no way that hundreds of Russian soldiers posted TikToks on the same morning revealing their locations and movements. The intention of this is to both misdirect from actual large-scale Russian movements and to lower Ukrainian morale: "Look how easy and fun it is for us to invade you".
- celticninja 5y ago
  There is also a possibility that they did exactly this because they are green, conscripted troops, who have grown up in social media age. They don't assume they will be tracked as individual soldiers, but in aggregate they leak information die to unprofessionalism. They have been doing this since 2014 so why do we expect them to be fully professional overnight?
- fragmede 5y ago
  Maybe not intentionally, but Google maps live traffic showed the Russian invasion of Ukraine. https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgd7dd/google-maps-live-traffic-showed-the-russian-invasion-of-ukraine https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgd7dd/google-maps-live-traf...
ISL 5y ago
I'm not sure that I'd call it a TikTok war, but rather the first major-power smartphone war. The world will bear witness to the consequences of this conflict in ways it never has before. It is no longer up to the editors of major news outlets to decide what is shared [1]. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/the-war-photo-no-one-would-publish/375762/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/th...
- rapind 5y ago
  Brace yourself for Putin “flooding the zone with shit”. Bannon didn’t invent it.
  - DoingIsLearning 5y ago
    There were already misformation comments on reddit trying to panic people into believing the Polish border was closed. Humans really can be terrible.
- psyc 5y ago
  Instead it’s up to the social media companies, who we know are invested in controlling content on their platforms. And [what I perceive as] a majority of HN users have been arguing all along that it’s wholly their prerogative to censor whatever they choose to. What kind of “change” is that? These behemoths are the new establishment, are they not? I checked the #ukraine tag on TikTok and found zero raw on the ground videos of conflict. Looks totally sanitized to me. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough. Maybe it’s merely hard to find. Maybe it isn’t allowed.
  - tsol 5y ago
    This is an interesting point. While newspapers would sometimes publish graphic images to show the reality on the ground during war, on social media gore is strictly not allowed. Even if there were recordings of awful war crimes being committed, would they be able to be shared freely? I imagine it'd be one of those times where you see a link reading "X soldiers committing heinous war crimes", click the link, and are met with "Sorry! This post has been removed for violating community guidelines". If your lucky someone will have linked a mirror in the comments section, but oftentimes that comment gets deleted rather quickly too. I don't know if any social media platform wants to be the associated with pictures of shocking traumatic acts of war.
cwkoss 5y ago
It was incredibly surreal last night to be scrolling through `#ukraine` videos of bombings that occurred within the past couple hours, with many of them accompanied by cutesy pop music. Intermixed with various teenage influencers impotently insulting Putin.
londons_explore 5y ago
Why didn't this happen in fairly recent wars in Sudan, Syria, Libya, Egypt, etc? It seems while those populations have smartphones and the internet, they failed to capture the attention of western media and western populations with their plight.
- jim-jim-jim 5y ago
  In the specific case of Syria, the evidence that surfaced was misaligned with the narrative that US intelligence and NGOs (but I repeat myself) were pushing.
- Mezzie 5y ago
  It involves major powers and (to be blunt) the way Ukrainians live looks similar to the way the western populations live. Their houses look similar, their cities are structured similarly, etc. so the videos hit harder on an emotional level. Also the Ukraine is far more embedded in the economic and moral calculus of the West. The US has made agreements with the Ukraine regarding protection, and basically all these decisions have major potential geopolitical ramifications. It's one of those potential tinderbox situations.
mrtksn 5y ago
It's not true that we have raw footage stream of the war, What we have is a curated stream that is optimised for engagement(until the content is found to be unhelpful with the official agenda, then it is censored). Actually, most of the raw footage comes from instant messaging(WhatsApp or Telegram, mostly), shared in groups with an agenda. Then it is shared on TikTok, Twitter etc. to a wider audience where it is curated and censored by algorithm that optimise for something(engagement, impression, revenue, agenda and so on). Which means, instead of getting our news from journalists on the ground who know the context(at least the good ones) we get a snapshot of the event curated by an algorithm or people the way the analytics told them to.
- nathanaldensr 5y ago
  I agree. It's like suddenly everyone's forgetting the power these media giants have to control their platforms. This isn't the YouTube of the early 2000s, everyone. Always treat unsourced and unverified information with skepticism, especially if the truthfulness of the content doesn't immediately affect you. Always ask yourself "why would they not censor this video but censor these others?"
- _dain_ 5y ago
  as if journalists do not have bias?
  - throoo0ooowaway 5y ago
    I've never understood the point of this claim that "journalists are biased!". All human beings are biased, and the systems we build inherit our biases. What is the alternative?
  - mrtksn 5y ago
    I don’t claim that they don’t, everyone has a bias. The difference is, with journalists actual humans observe a situation, builds an understanding, creates a presentation where picks or produces material to convey that to people who cannot observe it first hand. The accuracy and the fairness of the presentation they create defines their careers as journalists. Sometimes they build a reputation to be co complete hacks but the history is full of high quality reporting. The bias isn’t that big of an issue because there are multiple journalists who operate. Their censorship happens on editorial level but there are(or used to be) also high quality editors that don’t dilute the reality too much. With algorithms, everything is systematically optimized for some irrelevant to the truth metrics without any understanding of the context. It’s also censored on massive scale, you can’t really use another source to see a different perspective.
agumonkey 5y ago
It's quite surreal. Watching people being invaded. Jets, choppers taken down. Missiles hitting housing. And yet being powerless .. super weird. Even with the potential for fake news, it seems this might change the war dynamics. At the same time Ukrainians are fighting for their lives you can see Russian people protesting against this invasion. The real time loop could break military reality distortion field.. if you're a Russian soldier and you see people in your city walking the streets against what you've been ordered to do.. it might cause deep conflict in your head.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  That's a big "if", considering that social media is controlled in Russia, and that protests about the invasion can be made illegal.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    It's already happening a lot more than most of us expected. Officials, celebrities and normal people out in the street. Ukraine cities should show that on public displays for troops to see..
  - ReaLNero 5y ago
    > social media is controlled in Russia Far from it. News media might be, but rogue social media apps like Telegram and WhatsApp are used frequently, and are outside Russia's control.
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      I consider Telegram and WhatsApp as messengers, not social media. Social media would be VKontakte and similar.
- _dain_ 5y ago
- xwdv 5y ago
  Not really. You really think people can’t look at a crowd of protestors and think they’re idiots who should be destroyed? I’ve seen some protestors right here in the USA who I felt should be destroyed. Put me in the right place at the right time with the right weaponry and give me strict orders and I’m not so sure I would have a change of heart. I imagine a crazy Russian would be less forgiving.
not2b 5y ago
A lot of what is being shared is fake. Careful what you believe. Gizmodo has some examples: https://gizmodo.com/10-photos-and-videos-from-russias-invasion-of-ukraine-t-1848586587 https://gizmodo.com/10-photos-and-videos-from-russias-invasi...
- tester756 5y ago
  I've personally seen only one of those
  - TheFreim 5y ago
    I've only seen one and it was in the context of people mentioning that its fake.
- the_af 5y ago
  Wow. One of those was picked up by Argentinian media as if it was real war footage. The one from War Thunder, which was labeled as "Ukrainian missile defence firing". And to be honest, I bought it.
  - deutschewelle 5y ago
    Yes this is one of the problems with this "TikTok" war, an ARMA 3 gameplay video (C-RAM shooting down A-10 plane) was used as a war footage in Ukraine, the Tianjin factory explosion in 2016 being retweeted as Kiev, and some paratroop exercise from a while ago being shared as Russian Invasion. Now with deepfake and increasingly photorealistic real-time 3d engines like UE5 can cross the uncanny valley, especially when they are repeatedly reuploaded to the point compression artifacts make the footage even more believable. In 2003, the USG could've only dreamt of such deceptive tools, now its part of hybrid warfare.
dirtyid 5y ago
Here comes the first TikTok war west care about. There's tons of TikTok content about Syrian or Yemeni war over the years, or the more recent Nagorno-Karabakh, with associated OSINT analysis and communities. It just does not get much attention. Queue geopolitical conflict that affects the west and much of western OSINT analysts have pivoted from their respective areas to Ukraine, something not seen other conflicts. I get it, it's a sexier conflict where a competent military power is going balls out. Of course there's also issues of race as seen in EU policy towards UKR refugees.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  > Here comes the first TikTok war west care about. Sadly very true.
Azsy 5y ago
The point is somewhat undermined by, A: using artificial intelligence when statistics would have been enough ( or a failure to explain what part made it AI ) B: Using Chinese tiktok as the title. On a side note, Telegram is the nexus of raw information. For every video going viral on other sites, the other 99 stay on telegram and aren't very interesting for an outsider. Its going to be Russia's downfall if it doesn't have a way to control it.
- apetresc 5y ago
  How does one find the right Telegram rooms if they want to stay informed on this?
kirykl 5y ago
Choreographed dancing soldiers ?
wanderer_ 5y ago
Looking back into the previous era, in times like the Second World War, (mostly) all coverage of the fighting was done by war correspondents - civilian reporters who went into combat with the regular soldiers. They are responsible for the famous picture of the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima (which was actually the second flag raised, and IIRC that picture was not taken under fire).
- wanderer_ 5y ago
  I have some very fascinating photos and documentation of WWII war correspondents, if people are interested I might put them in a repo or something.
  - mikehotel 5y ago
    Please do publish the pictures [and docs]. The more we understand about war, the better.
    - wanderer_ 5y ago
      I'll try to figure out the best way to post them.
rossdavidh 5y ago
"The Russian invasion of Ukraine will be the first war to fully play out on social media. There will be no possibility of controlling the information." ...it has long ago become apparent that when you can't shut it off, you can drown it out with a greater quantity of fake. Not saying Russia will bother to do that here, but there certainly is a possibility. "And with social media, artificial intelligence and Internet-enabled crowd-sourcing, the intelligence will belong to the global public. And that changes everything." ...sounds very much like things I recall from the late 90's about how the internet would make dictatorships impossible because they relied on censorship. Dictatorships, uh, managed to survive. It would be awesome if ubiquitous smartphones "changed everything" about war. But it seems unlikely.
joelbondurant1 5y ago
[dead]
ufmace 5y ago
The curious aspect of this part will be who uploads what when, and why. Supposedly the Ukrainian gov is urging people not to post about their troop movements. I have no idea if that's true or not or if people are following the advice. Surely plenty of people for both armies are monitoring all the social media they can find for information about the other side's troop movements, and whichever side has more (correct) public information about who's doing what on the other side will have an advantage. They'll probably also be faking videos and selectively promoting things that make their side look good and the other side bad. It's a whole new type of propaganda war, and we've yet to see how much of an edge it will give to whoever does it better.
astrea 5y ago
> "The Russian invasion of Ukraine will be the first war to fully play out on social media". A lot of qualifiers here to solidify a weak thesis. Sure, the first "textbook" war (and probably not even that, I just personally can't recall any), but there have certainly been many revolutions and combat actions across the world that have been deeply documented across social media, aggregate sites, etc. for many years now.
titzer 5y ago
I have a nasty addiction to Reddit's r/publicfreakout. A few years back, it was mostly people getting angry and making fools of themselves in public. Then, it turned into street fights. In 2020 it was more fresh than broadcast news for BLM protests. Nowadays, it's back to street fights and car crashes, but when there is an international flare up, it's like a livestream. For me, it almost functions as a tripwire for huge international news. I imagine Twitch and other actual livestreams are insane right about now. (I dunno, I am not into it, or TikTok.)
mensetmanusman 5y ago
It is surreal seeing videos like this while waiting to pick up my kid from dance class: https://t.co/CqYg4qIUqf https://t.co/CqYg4qIUqf https://twitter.com/ThomasVLinge/status/1496860423810912259?s=20&t=BDNzZiBJrxDfnL_08PfxTw https://twitter.com/ThomasVLinge/status/1496860423810912259?...
joelbondurant4 5y ago
lamontcg 5y ago
Maybe it is just my own bubble, but it seems like more of a Twitter war than a TikTok war.
taf2 5y ago
Strange that the title is TikTok when reading the article I don’t even think TikTok was mentioned more like iPhone and androids that have cameras… I suppose it’s implying eveything is on tiktok? Yet the article references a twitter post showing an air fight between two jets…
fdhfdjkfhdkj 5y ago
jmacd 5y ago
It seems that much of the Ukrainian cellular network has been left up. No jamming, no outright bombing (at least that is being reported) and the country's internet connections have been left intact. We have to consider that this is very intentional. There must be some Russian calculus that the wide sharing of content within Ukraine and without serves some purpose. It's possible that Russia sees it as a free intelligence gathering platform. While this author may feel like this is a level playing field, I don't think that would be a safe assumption if you are actually on the ground in Ukraine.
slim 5y ago
This is nothing new. War have been waged on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc... since 2011. Examples are Palestine, Syria, Irak, Lybia and Ukraine I guess the author thinks there's something special about this war because it's "conventional". I'd argue no war will ever be conventional, if it's ever been in first place.

223 points by CrankyBear 5y ago

The first rule of decentralization is that it will eventually become centralized. We're already seeing version 0 of this with this morning's poorly implemented twitter livemap. I have no doubt that there are already defense contractors and private companies working to compile and package OSINT more reliably, completely, searchably, etc.

z58 5y ago

> The world was divided over who was telling the truth, and there was no way to tell (until “Baghdad Bob” fled). What? Nobody believed a word this man said.

LandR 5y ago
Yeah, the guy was a running joke / meme.
ethbr0 5y ago
His press briefings were widely played on international media, so someone believed. Because there's always someone gullible out there.
- dtech 5y ago
  It was mostly because everyone thought it was hilarious
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  Nobody believed. They were broadcast because he was an official spokesman and because they were newsworthy in their surreal falseness. And the thing about him is that it was not an attempt to convince at all. He didn't think anyone would believe him; he couldn't have, because you could see it in his face. It was theatrical, showy, a performance, not a tedious attempt to lie. If he had a purpose beyond personal survival it was to humanise the regime as much as was possible. Really nobody thought it was true, but perhaps it was useful to them that it was optimistic, brazen, indomitable, even charming.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    That's like saying no one believed Sean Spicer. If someone has an official title, they'll find a believing audience.
    - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
      No, it's not, quite. I don't know if I can describe the difference without getting into politics which is apparently as unwelcome here as humour, but here goes. I am trying to be apolitical here. Baghdad Bob and Sean Spicer were really quite different. OK so you are partly right on two fronts. One, there was a Baghdad Bob moment right at the beginning, the whole "largest crowd ever PERIOD" rant, but even the presentation and the sentiment of that were rather different. It had no humour, it was an angry, hectoring, nasty, shouted attempt to bully and control. Two, he failed at it in spectacular fashion, which did lead to him being car-crash television in kind of the same way BB was, except he'd so severely soured his relationship with the press corps that you were watching a man slowly shrinking, rather than a man in control of the limelight. But Spicer also was just plain bad at his job, ignorant of history, incompetent, indifferent or unkind on screen to the people he spoke to, had terrible presentation, no theatrics, no presence, and he told humdrum, lazy, formulaic lies among his charmless distribution of the day-to-day humdrum stuff. Not comparable to BB. No one believed in him, but the press corps went there expecting to -- needing to -- be told the truth. Apolitically: a really bad press secretary, in short. Out of his depth. Trump's own press conferences were much more like Baghdad Bob in tone and approach; Trump inflated the truth, told huge, flowery, dramatic lies, timed press conferences to distract, and used one ridiculous hoax claim to distract from the fallout from another. Theatrics, performance. A weird amount of car-crash TV control from sheer, unprepared brinksmanship and BS (in the specific sense of indifference to the distinction between truth and lies). Like with Baghdad Bob, the truth was never being approached; it's not what the Trump press conferences were even for. I often felt a little sorry for Sarah Huckabee-Sanders, who to be clear told the same sort of lies as Spicer, but at least you could tell it made her uncomfortable to do it, and you could tell she cared about the press corps as people. She especially hated clearing up after a Trump press conference.
bena 5y ago
Yeah. That war was essentially broadcast on cable. And yeah, sure, access to the U.S. military came with caveats, but it was possible to be a non-affiliated reporter. But it's also not like the stories couldn't be cross-checked with, you know, reality. You could relatively trust the information coming from U.S. sources, because they coincided with reality. Iraq was doing their best to prevent information coming in and going out. That's why Baghdad Bob became a meme. Because his accounts were hilariously at odds with reality. He'd go on TV and claim the American forces were in full retreat while being frog marched out the studio by those forces. And it's also not like this is going to be the first conflict in the social media age.
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
I genuinely thought... is this article satire, because I wasn't expecting that. The author isn't even too young to remember, so I am really puzzled by that claim. I, like everyone else, am glad that Baghdad Bob made it out alive, but I think we should have paid more attention to the idea that post-modern post-truth trolling could come from a source we expected to simply lie.
jessaustin 5y ago
Nobody believed a word this man said. Did he ever deny the presence of WMDs? Sometimes we must review our memories with the benefit of facts we learned later.

jedberg 5y ago

The openness of the raw video is great, but comes at a cost as well. For one, it will be hard to authenticate which videos are real and which are fake. While the curation of the news allowed the US to cherry pick only the "good stuff", it also let professional journalists vet the sources, and while they sometimes got it wrong, they were right far more often than a layperson.

ethbr0 5y ago
Has anyone worked on a standard for authentication / attestation of video? I was mulling it in the context of deepfakes, and there's enough money in it that someone has to be working on the problem. E.g. Something that signs metadata (time, geolocation) at time of capture in a verifiable manner
- ISL 5y ago
  Yes, but to my knowledge nobody has found a trusted solution. My guess is the best we can do is keychains of trust and the reputation that comes with them. Trustless authentication seems very difficult indeed.
- r1b 5y ago
  Yes, see https://contentauthenticity.org/ https://contentauthenticity.org/
  - terr-dav 5y ago
    An expert's criticisms: https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/919-Closed-Standards.html https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/919-Cl... https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/920-Another-Bad-Example-from-CAI.html https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/920-An...
    - r1b 5y ago
      Thanks, I was skeptical too :) I especially liked the phrase “chain of blame”

ianlevesque 5y ago

Quite concerning to me is that this was seemingly coordinated between Putin and Xi, and TikTok is controlled by China. So Putin could very easily control what gets prioritized and goes viral or what quietly disappears from the narrative due to lack of reach, with just a call to his buddy.

keewee7 5y ago
There is no way that hundreds of Russian soldiers posted TikToks on the same morning revealing their locations and movements. This is coordinated propaganda. It's meant to both misdirect from actual large-scale Russian movements and to lower Ukrainian morale: "Look how easy and fun it is for us to invade you".
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > There is no way that hundreds of Russian soldiers posted TikToks on the same morning revealing their locations and movements. Don't overestimate them. It might be a sign of a problem with discipline or morale, or overconfidence.
slg 5y ago
The use of "TikTok" in that phrase is just a synecdoche for "social media that allows people to easily share video they filmed on their phones". If you can't see this video on TikTok, you can still see it on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

paxys 5y ago

The problem with "open source intelligence" is that there is too much of it from every side. Fact checkers are already working overtime debunking all the Tweets showing footage from previous wars or even video games (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/02/21/fact-check-arma-3-not-russia-ukraine-conflict-shown-viral-video/6879521001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/02/21/fac...). The author is also majorly discounting the role of intelligence services in debunking Putin's false flag operations. Weeks worth of updates on Russia's exact plans and motivations haven't come from TikTok but rather the US government and its allies. There is no substitute for spies and satellites.

gzer0 5y ago

"The Russian invasion of Ukraine will be the first war to fully play out on social media. There will be no possibility of controlling the information." I disagree with this statement. The Chinese government has taken a controlling stake in Bytedance [1], which is the subsidiary that owns TikTok. It could perhaps, then be possible, that China would "alter" the algorithm of TikTok users worldwide to sway public opinion? Push certain videos that fit a given narrative, and hide others that don't? Tiktok collects and shares your data more than any other social media app, and it is unclear where it goes [2]. This could become a dangerous tool. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/17/chinese-government-bytedance-tiktok/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/17/chinese... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/08/tiktok-shares-your-data-more-than-any-other-social-media-app-study.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/08/tiktok-shares-your-data-more...

dustymcp 5y ago
This war is absolutely televised, there was some disgusting scenes on r/ukraine, i was pretty amazed about following it all in real time..
godelski 5y ago
While I think you're right that China has the power to shift the information dominance through TikTok I don't think it changes the author's main thesis about OSINT. There are other platforms. If information starts getting censored then people will jump to other platforms to share it. There is definitely a dangerous tool here too because there already has been a lot of fake images and videos appearing. It's unclear who is posting these but it certainty generates a lot of noise for OSINT. While the former situations had low noise but high bias in the current situation we may just have so much noise that it is impossible to figure out what is real or not. Though I think it still changes things since military analysts have better tools and know corroborating information to sort through this noise more easily. But fake news travels faster than truth.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Sure, but real time info about military conflicts has been shared on the internet since the 1991 Gulf War, and perhaps earlier. TikTok is just the latest in a long series of platforms where such info has been shared, and as you say there's nothing really special about it, it's just the most popular right now.

qiskit 5y ago

> Unlike in the Iraq War, where the only cameras were controlled by a handful of journalists and the US military It was an interesting read, but the guy is about 10 years too late. Social media today is most definitely controlled by a few news companies and the state ( military/admin/etc ). Especially when it comes to important news events. > The Pentagon learned a lesson from that conflict, which was: Control the information and imagery at all costs. And they applied that lesson in the Iraq War. As if the pentagon didn't know before the vietnam war to control the information and imagery at all costs. Of course they did. They controlled all the information. It was the state that decided to end the war. Not journalists. Not the people. > And with social media, artificial intelligence and Internet-enabled crowd-sourcing, the intelligence will belong to the global public. And that changes everything. The state curated, censored and controlled social media changes everything? Don't think so.

armchairhacker 5y ago
social media is controlled by a few companies but not completely. If someone uploads X and i search for X i’m not 100% guaranteed but very likely to find what they uploaded. Especially if X is common and popular. See: alt-right media being widespread on Twitter, Quora, Reddit, Google, and sometimes even YouTube. Not only is that stuff not censored, it’s actively being shown to people who are not alt-right and aren’t looking for alt-right content
- _dain_ 5y ago
  """alt-right""" content is censored to an absurd degree. (ask me how I know.)
  - animal_spirits 5y ago
    Next time you should just post a source to your claim instead of waiting for someone to ask you for the source

armchairhacker 5y ago

what’s going to happen when people upload videos of violent deaths and war crimes committed in real time? If not graphic stuff, videos of missiles and invading forces? Will TikTok / Facebook / Twitter censor these videos? Probably, but will they succeed? Will people watch the videos? Will they leak into mainstream sites? Right now despite the internet being notorious for violent and serious content, i think most mainstream sites are good at hiding it and most people definitely aren’t looking for it. But this is the first major conflict outside of the middle east / Africa (aka the first major conflict people are really paying attention to) where we have widespread social media and 4K video. If anything, i only hope that it will make the war more real and serious to people, so it will prevent further atrocities in this war and avoid wars in the future.

tomatotomato37 5y ago

While the ability of the internet to debunk falseflag operations is great, I feel like this is overstating it's usefulness for tracking the chaos of actual war. Most of the civilian videos I've seen so far seem to be more visually exciting shots of distant explosions in urban areas over any attempt to focus on what is shooting or is getting shot at. Contrary to public belief, knowing an artillery shell landed somewhere near a preschool/hospital/whatever ranks pretty low in actual tactical significance.

jim-jim-jim 5y ago

The Syria war (and its spillover into Iraq) was incredibly well documented. Then the major platforms took a stance against "extremism" and "disinformation" and removed heaps of invaluable footage.

keewee7 5y ago

Russian military videos on TikTok are coordinated propaganda and misinformation. There is no way that hundreds of Russian soldiers posted TikToks on the same morning revealing their locations and movements. The intention of this is to both misdirect from actual large-scale Russian movements and to lower Ukrainian morale: "Look how easy and fun it is for us to invade you".

celticninja 5y ago
There is also a possibility that they did exactly this because they are green, conscripted troops, who have grown up in social media age. They don't assume they will be tracked as individual soldiers, but in aggregate they leak information die to unprofessionalism. They have been doing this since 2014 so why do we expect them to be fully professional overnight?
fragmede 5y ago
Maybe not intentionally, but Google maps live traffic showed the Russian invasion of Ukraine. https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgd7dd/google-maps-live-traffic-showed-the-russian-invasion-of-ukraine https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgd7dd/google-maps-live-traf...

ISL 5y ago

I'm not sure that I'd call it a TikTok war, but rather the first major-power smartphone war. The world will bear witness to the consequences of this conflict in ways it never has before. It is no longer up to the editors of major news outlets to decide what is shared [1]. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/the-war-photo-no-one-would-publish/375762/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/th...

rapind 5y ago
Brace yourself for Putin “flooding the zone with shit”. Bannon didn’t invent it.
- DoingIsLearning 5y ago
  There were already misformation comments on reddit trying to panic people into believing the Polish border was closed. Humans really can be terrible.
psyc 5y ago
Instead it’s up to the social media companies, who we know are invested in controlling content on their platforms. And [what I perceive as] a majority of HN users have been arguing all along that it’s wholly their prerogative to censor whatever they choose to. What kind of “change” is that? These behemoths are the new establishment, are they not? I checked the #ukraine tag on TikTok and found zero raw on the ground videos of conflict. Looks totally sanitized to me. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough. Maybe it’s merely hard to find. Maybe it isn’t allowed.
- tsol 5y ago
  This is an interesting point. While newspapers would sometimes publish graphic images to show the reality on the ground during war, on social media gore is strictly not allowed. Even if there were recordings of awful war crimes being committed, would they be able to be shared freely? I imagine it'd be one of those times where you see a link reading "X soldiers committing heinous war crimes", click the link, and are met with "Sorry! This post has been removed for violating community guidelines". If your lucky someone will have linked a mirror in the comments section, but oftentimes that comment gets deleted rather quickly too. I don't know if any social media platform wants to be the associated with pictures of shocking traumatic acts of war.

cwkoss 5y ago

It was incredibly surreal last night to be scrolling through `#ukraine` videos of bombings that occurred within the past couple hours, with many of them accompanied by cutesy pop music. Intermixed with various teenage influencers impotently insulting Putin.

londons_explore 5y ago

Why didn't this happen in fairly recent wars in Sudan, Syria, Libya, Egypt, etc? It seems while those populations have smartphones and the internet, they failed to capture the attention of western media and western populations with their plight.

jim-jim-jim 5y ago
In the specific case of Syria, the evidence that surfaced was misaligned with the narrative that US intelligence and NGOs (but I repeat myself) were pushing.
Mezzie 5y ago
It involves major powers and (to be blunt) the way Ukrainians live looks similar to the way the western populations live. Their houses look similar, their cities are structured similarly, etc. so the videos hit harder on an emotional level. Also the Ukraine is far more embedded in the economic and moral calculus of the West. The US has made agreements with the Ukraine regarding protection, and basically all these decisions have major potential geopolitical ramifications. It's one of those potential tinderbox situations.

mrtksn 5y ago

It's not true that we have raw footage stream of the war, What we have is a curated stream that is optimised for engagement(until the content is found to be unhelpful with the official agenda, then it is censored). Actually, most of the raw footage comes from instant messaging(WhatsApp or Telegram, mostly), shared in groups with an agenda. Then it is shared on TikTok, Twitter etc. to a wider audience where it is curated and censored by algorithm that optimise for something(engagement, impression, revenue, agenda and so on). Which means, instead of getting our news from journalists on the ground who know the context(at least the good ones) we get a snapshot of the event curated by an algorithm or people the way the analytics told them to.

nathanaldensr 5y ago
I agree. It's like suddenly everyone's forgetting the power these media giants have to control their platforms. This isn't the YouTube of the early 2000s, everyone. Always treat unsourced and unverified information with skepticism, especially if the truthfulness of the content doesn't immediately affect you. Always ask yourself "why would they not censor this video but censor these others?"
_dain_ 5y ago
as if journalists do not have bias?
- throoo0ooowaway 5y ago
  I've never understood the point of this claim that "journalists are biased!". All human beings are biased, and the systems we build inherit our biases. What is the alternative?
- mrtksn 5y ago
  I don’t claim that they don’t, everyone has a bias. The difference is, with journalists actual humans observe a situation, builds an understanding, creates a presentation where picks or produces material to convey that to people who cannot observe it first hand. The accuracy and the fairness of the presentation they create defines their careers as journalists. Sometimes they build a reputation to be co complete hacks but the history is full of high quality reporting. The bias isn’t that big of an issue because there are multiple journalists who operate. Their censorship happens on editorial level but there are(or used to be) also high quality editors that don’t dilute the reality too much. With algorithms, everything is systematically optimized for some irrelevant to the truth metrics without any understanding of the context. It’s also censored on massive scale, you can’t really use another source to see a different perspective.

agumonkey 5y ago

It's quite surreal. Watching people being invaded. Jets, choppers taken down. Missiles hitting housing. And yet being powerless .. super weird. Even with the potential for fake news, it seems this might change the war dynamics. At the same time Ukrainians are fighting for their lives you can see Russian people protesting against this invasion. The real time loop could break military reality distortion field.. if you're a Russian soldier and you see people in your city walking the streets against what you've been ordered to do.. it might cause deep conflict in your head.

selfhoster11 5y ago
That's a big "if", considering that social media is controlled in Russia, and that protests about the invasion can be made illegal.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  It's already happening a lot more than most of us expected. Officials, celebrities and normal people out in the street. Ukraine cities should show that on public displays for troops to see..
- ReaLNero 5y ago
  > social media is controlled in Russia Far from it. News media might be, but rogue social media apps like Telegram and WhatsApp are used frequently, and are outside Russia's control.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    I consider Telegram and WhatsApp as messengers, not social media. Social media would be VKontakte and similar.
_dain_ 5y ago
xwdv 5y ago
Not really. You really think people can’t look at a crowd of protestors and think they’re idiots who should be destroyed? I’ve seen some protestors right here in the USA who I felt should be destroyed. Put me in the right place at the right time with the right weaponry and give me strict orders and I’m not so sure I would have a change of heart. I imagine a crazy Russian would be less forgiving.

not2b 5y ago

A lot of what is being shared is fake. Careful what you believe. Gizmodo has some examples: https://gizmodo.com/10-photos-and-videos-from-russias-invasion-of-ukraine-t-1848586587 https://gizmodo.com/10-photos-and-videos-from-russias-invasi...

tester756 5y ago
I've personally seen only one of those
- TheFreim 5y ago
  I've only seen one and it was in the context of people mentioning that its fake.
the_af 5y ago
Wow. One of those was picked up by Argentinian media as if it was real war footage. The one from War Thunder, which was labeled as "Ukrainian missile defence firing". And to be honest, I bought it.
- deutschewelle 5y ago
  Yes this is one of the problems with this "TikTok" war, an ARMA 3 gameplay video (C-RAM shooting down A-10 plane) was used as a war footage in Ukraine, the Tianjin factory explosion in 2016 being retweeted as Kiev, and some paratroop exercise from a while ago being shared as Russian Invasion. Now with deepfake and increasingly photorealistic real-time 3d engines like UE5 can cross the uncanny valley, especially when they are repeatedly reuploaded to the point compression artifacts make the footage even more believable. In 2003, the USG could've only dreamt of such deceptive tools, now its part of hybrid warfare.

dirtyid 5y ago

Here comes the first TikTok war west care about. There's tons of TikTok content about Syrian or Yemeni war over the years, or the more recent Nagorno-Karabakh, with associated OSINT analysis and communities. It just does not get much attention. Queue geopolitical conflict that affects the west and much of western OSINT analysts have pivoted from their respective areas to Ukraine, something not seen other conflicts. I get it, it's a sexier conflict where a competent military power is going balls out. Of course there's also issues of race as seen in EU policy towards UKR refugees.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
> Here comes the first TikTok war west care about. Sadly very true.

Azsy 5y ago

The point is somewhat undermined by, A: using artificial intelligence when statistics would have been enough ( or a failure to explain what part made it AI ) B: Using Chinese tiktok as the title. On a side note, Telegram is the nexus of raw information. For every video going viral on other sites, the other 99 stay on telegram and aren't very interesting for an outsider. Its going to be Russia's downfall if it doesn't have a way to control it.

apetresc 5y ago
How does one find the right Telegram rooms if they want to stay informed on this?

kirykl 5y ago

Choreographed dancing soldiers ?

wanderer_ 5y ago

Looking back into the previous era, in times like the Second World War, (mostly) all coverage of the fighting was done by war correspondents - civilian reporters who went into combat with the regular soldiers. They are responsible for the famous picture of the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima (which was actually the second flag raised, and IIRC that picture was not taken under fire).

wanderer_ 5y ago
I have some very fascinating photos and documentation of WWII war correspondents, if people are interested I might put them in a repo or something.
- mikehotel 5y ago
  Please do publish the pictures [and docs]. The more we understand about war, the better.
  - wanderer_ 5y ago
    I'll try to figure out the best way to post them.

rossdavidh 5y ago

"The Russian invasion of Ukraine will be the first war to fully play out on social media. There will be no possibility of controlling the information." ...it has long ago become apparent that when you can't shut it off, you can drown it out with a greater quantity of fake. Not saying Russia will bother to do that here, but there certainly is a possibility. "And with social media, artificial intelligence and Internet-enabled crowd-sourcing, the intelligence will belong to the global public. And that changes everything." ...sounds very much like things I recall from the late 90's about how the internet would make dictatorships impossible because they relied on censorship. Dictatorships, uh, managed to survive. It would be awesome if ubiquitous smartphones "changed everything" about war. But it seems unlikely.

joelbondurant1 5y ago

[dead]

ufmace 5y ago

The curious aspect of this part will be who uploads what when, and why. Supposedly the Ukrainian gov is urging people not to post about their troop movements. I have no idea if that's true or not or if people are following the advice. Surely plenty of people for both armies are monitoring all the social media they can find for information about the other side's troop movements, and whichever side has more (correct) public information about who's doing what on the other side will have an advantage. They'll probably also be faking videos and selectively promoting things that make their side look good and the other side bad. It's a whole new type of propaganda war, and we've yet to see how much of an edge it will give to whoever does it better.

astrea 5y ago

> "The Russian invasion of Ukraine will be the first war to fully play out on social media". A lot of qualifiers here to solidify a weak thesis. Sure, the first "textbook" war (and probably not even that, I just personally can't recall any), but there have certainly been many revolutions and combat actions across the world that have been deeply documented across social media, aggregate sites, etc. for many years now.

titzer 5y ago

I have a nasty addiction to Reddit's r/publicfreakout. A few years back, it was mostly people getting angry and making fools of themselves in public. Then, it turned into street fights. In 2020 it was more fresh than broadcast news for BLM protests. Nowadays, it's back to street fights and car crashes, but when there is an international flare up, it's like a livestream. For me, it almost functions as a tripwire for huge international news. I imagine Twitch and other actual livestreams are insane right about now. (I dunno, I am not into it, or TikTok.)

mensetmanusman 5y ago

It is surreal seeing videos like this while waiting to pick up my kid from dance class: https://t.co/CqYg4qIUqf https://t.co/CqYg4qIUqf https://twitter.com/ThomasVLinge/status/1496860423810912259?s=20&t=BDNzZiBJrxDfnL_08PfxTw https://twitter.com/ThomasVLinge/status/1496860423810912259?...

joelbondurant4 5y ago

lamontcg 5y ago

Maybe it is just my own bubble, but it seems like more of a Twitter war than a TikTok war.

taf2 5y ago

Strange that the title is TikTok when reading the article I don’t even think TikTok was mentioned more like iPhone and androids that have cameras… I suppose it’s implying eveything is on tiktok? Yet the article references a twitter post showing an air fight between two jets…

fdhfdjkfhdkj 5y ago

jmacd 5y ago

It seems that much of the Ukrainian cellular network has been left up. No jamming, no outright bombing (at least that is being reported) and the country's internet connections have been left intact. We have to consider that this is very intentional. There must be some Russian calculus that the wide sharing of content within Ukraine and without serves some purpose. It's possible that Russia sees it as a free intelligence gathering platform. While this author may feel like this is a level playing field, I don't think that would be a safe assumption if you are actually on the ground in Ukraine.

slim 5y ago

This is nothing new. War have been waged on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc... since 2011. Examples are Palestine, Syria, Irak, Lybia and Ukraine I guess the author thinks there's something special about this war because it's "conventional". I'd argue no war will ever be conventional, if it's ever been in first place.