The invasion of Ukraine is not the first social media war, but it is the most viral

YOU HAVE probably seen the videos from Ukraine. There is the one where Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, stands outside Kyiv’s government quarter in dim light, holding his smartphone with the camera pointed selfie-style at himself and several senior officials. “We are all here,” he declares, days after Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, sent his tanks across the border. Or the one a Ukrainian soldier took, showing his mates in a snowy field firing anti-tank missiles, set to a thumping techno soundtrack. Or the one where a Ukrainian woman approaches a group of Russian soldiers and tells them to put sunflower seeds in their pockets so that something useful will grow from their bodies when they die.