Sure, we've been discussing war online since the Web started (I sure did; I was online after I got out of school on 9/11), but that was all or mostly text. All the photos and video we were provided were still carefully controlled.
It's not TikTok. It's the smart phone. In the Gulf War, if the one guy with a camcorder agreed not to show you committing a war atrocity, that was it. It was done. Now? Good luck.
And medium matters. The outrage generated by the Vietnam War is partially due to it being the first major US conflict after a substantial portion of the population had access to TV.
I imagine these hypothetical "other platforms" (could you name one?) will be deemed as "that bad place that platforms <insert scary thing here>", omitted from search engine results/feeds, advertisers blasted on twitter/pull out, and payment systems cancelled, with direct sharing being the only real way to propagate the videos. We've clearly seen effective censorship like this over the last few years, with other unfavorable topics (right or wrong). I don't see how it's possible to consider the internet as some free place where unfavorable ideas can be exchanged, at a public/viral level.
Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp, PeerTube, Signal, Telegram, Matrix. Need I go on?
> We've clearly seen effective censorship
I'd beg to differ.
There is definitely a dangerous tool here too because there already has been a lot of fake images and videos appearing. It's unclear who is posting these but it certainty generates a lot of noise for OSINT. While the former situations had low noise but high bias in the current situation we may just have so much noise that it is impossible to figure out what is real or not. Though I think it still changes things since military analysts have better tools and know corroborating information to sort through this noise more easily. But fake news travels faster than truth.