RUSSIA’S INVASION OF Ukraine is not the first social media war—but it is the first to play out on TikTok. The 2011 Arab Spring was fomented and furthered on Twitter and Facebook. Clips of Syrian children choking from chemical weapons filled social media timelines in 2018. And the Taliban’s capture of Kabul, with all the chaos that wrought, was live-tweeted into our homes last year. Images of unspeakable horrors supplanting the banality of status updates and selfies is nothing new. But the current conflict is a very different kind of social media war, fueled by TikTok’s transformative effect on the old norms of tech.

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"I've got most of my information about periods from TikTok," said 18-year-old Efa Angharad.

The sixth-former from Gorslas, Carmarthenshire, said her period education had been "pretty shocking".

It comes as a Swansea University study found menstrual cycle education needed to be addressed in schools.

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Ogilvy UK will no longer work with influencers who distort or retouch their bodies or faces for brand campaigns in a bid to combat social media’s “systemic” mental health harms.

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"I guess they were just quite media savvy," he told counter-terrorism detectives. "They would put things out there [on social media] quite quickly that was easily picked up, yeah."

And so - for a potentially bored teenager living a humdrum life in suburban London - the war not only appeared like an exciting video game on social media, it came packaged with an appealing message that there was a role for everyone else.

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Before the rise of YouTube and Facebook, Ghyslain Raza became an internet star better known as the Star Wars Kid. It wasn't on purpose, or even wanted, but he's learned to move past it and hopes others can do the same.

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Marta Vasyuta is a regular 20-year-old Ukrainian.

And like many people of her age she's on TikTok.

Until last week she had a few hundred followers on the video-sharing app. She posted videos from nights out, and lip-synced to her favourite music.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, she happened to be in the UK visiting friends she'd met at university.

She watched in horror at reports of Russian bombs falling on Kyiv.

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