The paper proposes a qualitative analysis on the visual elements that make up the aesthetics of digital influencers’ content who produce material about the war in Ukraine, known as 'War-influencers'. The objective is to observe how these actors establish themselves as a new category of digital influencers emerging on TikTok, using the platform's contemporary language to transform the topic of war into a niche within the creator economy on entertainment platforms, while also serving as a space for advocacy.
More specifically, the research aims to characterize the technical (Latour, 1994) and rhetorical-visual mediation through which discourses of national identity assimilation take shape on TikTok. It is argued that the popularity of content about the Ukraine War offers a privileged and unexplored context for thinking about new forms of identity formation in a digital context (Castells, 2010), by transforming the experience of war into a monetizable experience on social networks (Abidin, 2021)
Through an experimental methodology, the investigation uses affordances (Bucher, T. & Helmond, A., 2018) offered by the application, to observe a certain phenomenon from the user's perspective. The profile used in the research was exposed to content through automated recommendation after triggering the algorithm during six months of active research on the niche in question. Thus, it was possible to manually build a database consisting of 400 videos from the war niche on the TikTok platform, which were collected and analyzed qualitatively, focusing on the production of three specific high-reach accounts, both representing non-combatant young profiles, and military content.

Authors:
Giullia Thomaz, Utrecht University, Netherlands

About the Presenter(s)
Ms Giullia Thomaz is a PhD in Cultural Anthropology at the Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. She is also a researcher at the Center for Technology and Society at the Getulio Vargas Foundation.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/giullia-thomaz-51a634101/

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