From the Battlefield to the Screen: A Case Study of Wagner Group Propaganda on TikTok

• In Event: Crime, Science and Politics WG Panel 8: Crime, Media, and Populist Discourse

Abstract

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, our media ecosystem has been saturated with information about the conflict, which has been used or manipulated by one or more of the belligerents and their allies for propaganda purposes. Propaganda has always been a feature of armed conflict. Still, its nature has changed radically with the new actors involved and because of the vectors it uses, such as the proliferated digital platforms. This article focuses on the controversial Wagner group, which has used these digital platforms, particularly TikTok, to relay numerous videos featuring its members and their actions. Our approach falls within propaganda studies and their relationship with criminology. These studies aim to ‘identify how narratives are constructed, conveyed and embedded within public and political discourses’. We are interested in the narratives and discourses fabricated and disseminated by the Wagner group, which feed a toxic communication designed to mobilize ‘hearts and minds’ to recruit, as well as to destabilize information about the conflict and thus cause social and political harm.

Authors

• François Gillardin, Université de Montréal

• Samuel Tanner, Université de Montréal