Birds of Madyar’s Weaponised Feed : A Cross-Platform Visual Analysis of Frontline Cultural Production

Sammanfattning

This qualitative visual analysis explores how the Ukrainian drone unit Birds of Madyar influences cultural production by portraying warfare on social media between 2024 and 2025. The dominant research in this field is macro-focused, leaving a gap in micro-level analysis of how frontline units themselves mediate warfare. This thesis views the unit’s presence across Telegram, YouTube, and Instagram as an interconnected “info-matrix” situated in a decentralised, hyper-personalised, attention-driven digital environment. This environment forms the puzzle of this thesis, from frontline activity traditionally marked by secrecy to today, where these activities are hyper-visible. Enabling digital participation through cultural means. By combining a visual analysis with an abductive thematic analysis of 60 videos, this thesis builds on Hoskins and Shchelin’s War Feed and Ford and Hoskins’ Weaponised Archive, which together form the “Weaponised Feed”. Through this lens, the unit is examined for how it depicts the Russo-Ukrainian war, influencing perception and memory. Three key findings were identified: (I) war is aestheticised, presented as entertainment; (II) Ukrainian operators are portrayed as competent, resilient professionals with fearless attitudes; and (III) the unit curates the visibility of violence through platform-specific editing to manage meaning-making and archiving. The thesis argues that frontline units are active cultural producers by normalising violence. This affects immediate outcomes such as donations and mobilisation, and shapes long-term digital memory and public opinion of the war.