Incompatible Interpretive Worlds: TikTok, Douyin, and Geopolitical Narratives of the Russia–Ukraine War

Abstract

This study compares the ways TikTok and its mainland Chinese counterpart, Douyin, have mediated the Russia–Ukraine war, generating divergent geopolitical narratives. It examines the political role of platform dissemination in contemporary warfare by analysing how platform logics and governance contexts shape public sense-making of conflict. On TikTok, war narratives emerge through creator-led circulation, cross-border viewing, translation, and comment-mediated interpretation, producing forms of transnational witnessing that are affective, participatory, and contested. In contrast, Douyin operates within the Chinese domestic discourse system, where official emphasis on neutrality, stability, and diplomatic restraint shapes its dominant interpretive framework. In the corpus, footage of frontline violence appears less consistently prominent, while explanatory narratives attributing the war to NATO expansion or Western provocation appear frequently in high-visibility content. This distribution should not be interpreted as an explicit pro-Russian diplomatic stance. Rather, it reflects the importance of sovereignty-oriented reasoning and nationalist sentiment in Chinese political communication. Drawing on comparative qualitative content analysis of high-engagement, platform-curated war-related videos retrieved through hashtag-based sampling on TikTok and Douyin, this study argues that the two applications produce incompatible interpretive worlds: one organised around transnational humanitarian witnessing and contested moral interpretation, and the other around institutionally anchored geopolitical explanation, sovereignty-oriented reasoning, and participatory nationalist uptake.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Media and Communication, 2026 · DOI ↗