Ukraine War: Telegram can bring full horror of deadly combat into your living room and even entice you to take part – Professor Andrew Hoskins

Yet today’s advance of the smartphone-warrior is not some kind of democratisation of battle, but rather a whole new world disorder in which human rights fail as civilian blurs to combatant. There are no bystanders in digital war. War today is defined by the rise of the hybrid messaging, with communication and network platform Telegram, the wounding and the witnessing app of choice for smartphone-enabled, civilian combatants in Ukraine.

On Telegram, you can sponsor a Russian sniper rifle, or inscribe a message on a 152mm rocket shell which will shoot Russians. Participants can even get a personalised battle report, with a photo or video showing the damage from the weapon they have donated, including a message of thanks from the sniper who fired it. War is commodified for the people with their receipt as proof of killing.

This first-person point of view is presenting war as a videogame. Such ‘gamification’ is also engaged in by those with little grasp of the risks of creating, posting and sharing data and information. The everyday digital carelessness around not reading the ‘terms of use’ infiltrate contemporary war.

Citizens turned intelligence agents

Take 19-year-old Yana Suvorova. She ran an anti-Russian propaganda channel, transmitting information to Kyiv about the deployment and movement of Russian military personnel. Remarkably, perhaps, she seemed unaware of the potential gravity of her actions until her arrest in November 2023 by Russian authorities and her parading in front of the Russian news media. Her response? She fell in love with a Ukrainian intelligence major, who she passed the data onto.

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Naivety or otherwise, this case illustrates the risks to citizens whose identities slip easily into one of combatant or foreign intelligence agent, through their ready access to data and information used to prosecute warfare, and the means with which to spread it.

But gamification distracts from what is most extraordinary about today’s participative war unfolding in Ukraine, Gaza and Israel. Telegram also delivers the reality of war in continuous plain sight. All that was once illicit, unshowable and unwatchable about war is in unlimited supply on your smartphone. The world has never seen such an abundance of human suffering, injury and death, pouring from a battlefield.

Telegram has little platform regulation, human or algorithmic moderation or other forms of control that restrict or censor the use or distribution of such visual content. It is like the wild west for waging and watching war, where the cultures and sensibilities of traditional and social media, do not apply.

Real images more dangerous than fakes

A Telegram video post from the “Archangel of Special Forces”, a channel with over a million subscribers, was created by airborne troopers showing a drone’s eye view, as it zooms in on individual Ukrainian soldiers on the ground, followed by the dropping of grenades, and the killing of a soldier who tries to crawl away after being injured. This post has been shared and celebrated through thousands of emojis. Participative war has no end.

The social media clouds of war have replaced the fog of war – a new ‘Military-Social-Media-Complex’. AI-generated deepfakes are unleashing an incredible new force of propaganda and make the digital battlefield more chaotic. Yet it is the billions of real images and videos, rather than the fake, that pose the bigger theat. It is through its openness that Telegram has become the most effective weapon of psychological war of this century.

What is stopping the horror of violence and killing from being recorded on smartphones, uploaded and shared and applauded on Telegram, and you or I or anyone from watching it? The answer is nothing. Psychological war is free on Telegram. Record your real horror, upload, and go!

War of media insurgency

All of this begs the question – where are the algorithms, the moderators, the regulators? Telegram tends to leave such matters to the preference of channel creators themselves. This creates a challenge for new European regulation – the EU Digital Services Act – as well as for Telegram, which demands that platforms deal with unlawful content and hate speech through moderation.

The EU’s measuring of the risk of platforms as a hierarchy of attention based on numbers of active users, misses the point entirely. Rather, the emergent and the easily exploitable smaller platforms, such as Telegram, are the weakest link in connected media ecologies which feed the very content that the EU is attempting to block.

Hamas uploaded footage of its October 7 attacks on Israel as part of its psychological war, ie look what we can do to you, and Israel used the same medium as a counter – to proclaim to the world – look at what is being done to us. It is from Telegram that such content then spreads, including in mainstream news media. This is a war of media insurgency.

In some ways Telegram is a return to the ‘open’ values of Web 1.0, but instead of the ‘open web’ we are confronted with the worst of humankind; informational pollution of our lives. And digital horror does not end when war ends. Rather, digital participation is forging the greatest archive ever created of the atrocities of war.

Will this ensure the perpetual retraumatising of populations in a forever psychological war, or offer something usable in the pursuit of reconciliation, justice and accountability?

Andrew Hoskins is professor of global security at the University of Glasgow. He leads a new European Research Council advanced grant/UKRI project: The New War Front: Digital Participation in War (2025-30). His latest book, with Matthew Ford, is Radical War: Data, Attention & Control in the Twenty-First Century.