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After the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., I watched the first few nights of protests on video that was livestreamed by protesters on the ground. This is how I saw the military vehicles, the police officers in riot gear and the clouds of tear gas hovering over West Florissant Avenue. All these images would have been available on CNN or MSNBC or Fox News, but what the livestreams included were the reactions of the person holding the camera. Watching them felt almost illicit; we were seeing and hearing something we weren’t supposed to.
About a year later, I met one of those livestreamers, a man named Bassem Masri, at an IHOP in St. Louis. Masri, who died in 2018, told me then about how many times he had been pulled over and harassed by the police, the ties he felt to the Black community in the city and the connections he saw between Ferguson and his Palestinian heritage. Those details mattered to me as a writer because they created those mostly facile links between a person’s background and their actions. But when I went home to write the story, I realized there was little that I could commit to print that could bring Bassem Masri to life in a way that rivaled his own video production of himself in a crowd of police officers and protesters.
It became clear to me that this personalized form of reportage would eventually become the ultimate form of storytelling, especially in chaotic conflicts where nobody really could tell what was going on. Not only did it feel more immediate and real, but it also cut out the middleman, namely me and my colleagues in the media. In 2014, we were already thought of as somewhat untrustworthy by some, but now, in a time of widespread distrust of the legacy media by both the left and the right, we can be seen as full-on antagonists.
There does seem to be something new this time about the speed and credulity with which these videos have traveled around the internet and the emotional response they’ve generated in the West. Perhaps the most accurate thing to say about social media and the invasion of Ukraine is that it’s the first time that millions of people watched a war on their phones and felt almost morally compelled to believe every image of bravery, no matter how implausible. Given the choice between seeing the footage on CNN or through their social media feeds, many now are choosing the latter because they believe it comes with an aura of authenticity and without the assumed “agendas” of the mainstream media. For the first few days of the conflict, it felt as if the desire to figure out the truth on the ground had evaporated. What replaced it was a fantastical vision that turned a brutal, terrifying and bloody invasion into the Ukrainian version of the film “Braveheart.”
Scraps of footage of blown-up television towers, Russian helicopters coming under what looks like antiaircraft fire, apartment buildings being hit with missiles and the stirring footage of the citizens of Kyiv arming themselves have been seen around the world. Many of these are real, but many more have not been confirmed or verified. We might see what it looks like when an airstrike hits an apartment building, but we do not really know anything else. Where is this building? Who fired upon it? How many people are dead? Is it even in Ukraine?