On the snow roads near Kursk, tanks and military equipment stop traffic. Videos from across the Russian city — roughly 100 miles from the Ukrainian border — show cars waiting in line to cross train tracks used to transport tanks from one place to another. Dozens of military vehicles were photographed parked together. And shaky footage shows tanks roaring across snowy ground along a busy road. All of these recordings have one thing in common: they were shared on TikTok.
If Russia invades Ukraine, don’t expect TikToks to stop. From small Belarusian villages to industrial Russian towns on the Ukrainian border, as tanks and troops rolled in, locals filmed the scenes on their phones and uploaded what could one day be crucial evidence to social media.
“There’s a lot of data,” says Benjamin Strick, director of investigations at the Center for Information Resiliency (CIR), a nonprofit organization that focuses on countering influence operations. The CIR team, along with other open source researchers, have been busy checking and mapping videos of troop movements in Russia and Belarus for several weeks, painstakingly comparing landmarks in the videos with satellite images and other official data to confirm their authenticity. The CIR map from verified videos charts the movements of military equipment and troops around Ukraine’s eastern flanks. In January, CIR mapped 79 pieces of footage; in february has checked 166 videos so far.
From April 2021 the mobilization of Russian troops is accompanied by reams of digital evidence. They come from a variety of sources, from smartphone footage to high-resolution overhead images captured by commercial satellite companies. Troops, helicopters and military equipment have been spotted on satellite images. But for people on the ground, TikTok has become a key platform for displaying military movements.
“TikTok is definitely one of the main platforms used to document this,” says Elliott Higgins, founder of the open-source investigative unit Bellingcat, which has been exposing Russian espionage for years. These shots also often end up on Twitter or other social media platforms and join other shots posted there.
TikTok videos from the vicinity of Kursk, the location of which has been confirmed by CIR, provide a snapshot of how powerful open source intelligence, also known as OSINT, has become. Videos contribute to media reports and political discussions. They can be low-quality and poorly framed, but they show exactly what is happening at a certain moment.
