Working as speech acts that delineate online communities, claims to victimhood tend to evoke contestation. Their inherent political nature spurs user engagement in the shape of clicks, shares, emojis, and so on. TikTok’s multimodality has given rise to new practices of engagement that significantly shape …

Short abstract: This paper brings a media theoretical perspective on mediatized wars. It argues that the affordances and use cultures of popular social media platforms turn wars into live media events, involving both people who are living under war and those joining in from a distance. Long abstract: …