Until late 2021, the TikTok account mostly featured videos of motorcycles careening around English roads. Then in February, something changed: the account began uploading purported war footage of Ukraine, earning tens of millions of views.
But this motorcycle enthusiast hadn’t traveled to a war zone. Instead, he was uploading video game footage to TikTok and tagging it with a Ukrainian flag. As Russia’s attack on Ukraine dominates headlines, some social media grifters are passing off video game clips as battle footage. They’re amassing huge viewerships—and playing into the Kremlin’s nefarious conspiracy theories about the war.
The British motorcyclist’s video, which showed computer-generated missile launches, racked up more than 27 million views in late February, when YouTuber Kitboga made a video exposing it as a fraud.
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The video has since been removed. But thanks to TikTok’s “stitch” and “duets” functions, which let users remix each other’s videos, the clip has reappeared on other channels, sometimes spliced together with users’ commentary or (in one particularly surreal case) with an advertisement for an adults-only video site.
Other opportunists have uploaded their own war forgeries to TikTok. One such video, first flagged by BBC reporter Shayan Sardarizadeh, purports to show a warplane firing on parachuters. As some of the clip’s more than 6.5 million viewers noted, the footage is not from Ukraine, or even the physical world, but from the video game Arma 3.
A realistic first-person shooter game, Arma 3 has become a strange breakout hit on social media channels dedicated to Russia’s war on Ukraine. On TikTok, a cottage industry of video-makers have used the game to stage simulations of Ukrainian battlegrounds, imagining how the war might look from the frontlines, or even making CGI footage of Ukrainian soldiers dancing next to surface-to-air missiles. The dancing soldier animations are clear fakes, and are labeled with an “Arma3” hashtag. But other clips from the game are harder to identify.
Shortly after Russia’s initial assault last month, the live streaming platform Facebook Gaming was host to more than 90 channels that misrepresented Arma 3 footage as real video from Ukraine, Bloomberg reported. Meanwhile, footage from another video game, Digital Combat Simulator, went viral after gamers falsely claimed that it showed the “Ghost of Kyiv,” a fabled Ukrainian fighter jet.
The fake videos aren’t just helping TikTok clout-chasers. They’re feeding into a digital fog of war.
After news stations in Spain and Romania aired Arma 3 clips as legitimate, conspiracy theorists on TikTok and Telegram pointed to the footage as proof that the entire war was fake. On a large QAnon Telegram channel, for instance, commenters claimed the Spanish footage was evidence of Democrats trying to gin up a war to distract from scandal.
Some creators of ultra-viral Ukraine video game footage, meanwhile, have clarified that their clips are not real.
“This footage is from DCS [Digital Combat Simulator],” wrote the creator of a video with more than 2 million views, “but is nevertheless made out of respect for ‘The Ghost of Kiev.’ If he is real, may God be with him; if he is fake, I pray for more like ‘him.’”
