‘Pew Pew’: The Chinese companies marketing anti-drone weapons on TikTok

“Pie, bank, bank!” a woman in sneakers and high-waisted pink pants says cheerfully in a video uploaded to TikTok. She stands on what appears to be an industrial roof as she demonstrates how to use a black device that looks like a large laser tag gun. “Stop gun, okay,” she added, flashing a thumbs up. “Contact me!”

These days, almost any imaginable product is available on TikTok directly from Chinese factories, ranging from industrial chemicals to mystical crystals and custom pilates reformers. The app’s offerings, it seems, now also extend to drone jammers and other drone-related hardware with clear military and security applications.

In recent months, TikTok has become an unlikely showcase for a drone economy that forces conflicts like Russia’s war in Ukraine. Eager to reach customers however they can, small Chinese drone manufacturers They publicly broadcast tools of modern warfare, including anti-drone guns, jammers and sensors, but present them with the breezy cadence of consumer lifestyle advertising. The result is a surreal combination of e-commerce and battlefield combat.

WIRED reviewed dozens of videos from TikTok accounts that claim to sell various types of anti-drone equipment, including products that look like a glue drop-shaped dome on a tripod, a large box-like “jamming gun” and a backpack with 12 antennas. The subtitles on the videos are often in both Chinese and English, but others also include translations in Russian, Ukrainian or other languages. One video that’s going to jump for industrial house music features what the user labeled a “9-band FPV anti drone jammer,” a device used to disrupt and block the radio and navigation signals that small drones use to communicate.

Drone Dependencies

Both Russia and Ukraine raced to expand domestic drone production and strengthen their defenses against drone attacks. But much of that manufacturing still rests Chinese components. Processors, sensors, speed controllers, cameras and radio modules on both sides of the war are largely sourced from the same clusters of factories in and around Shenzhen, China’s hardware manufacturing capital.

“Even though Kiev has tried to diversify away from Chinese sources, Ukraine still relies heavily on large Chinese companies for cheap drones and drone parts,” said Aosheng Pusztaszeri, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies focused on emerging technology and national security.

Beijing restricts the export of technologies that have both civilian and military purposes, including drones and related components, and it has repeatedly tightened those rules since the war in Ukraine began in early 2022. In September 2024, China expanded the controls to cover key parts needed to make battlefield drones, such as flight controllers and motors. Around the same time, the US Govt announced it was sanctioning two Chinese companies for allegedly selling drone parts to Russia.

Despite the restrictions, trade figures indicate that Chinese drones continued to flow through intermediaries to Russia and Ukraine, says Pusztaszer. In the first half of 2024, Chinese companies officially sold only about $200,000 worth of drones to Kiev. But the Ukrainian government puts the estimate much higher — closer to $1.1 billion. “That gap suggests that fully assembled Chinese drones and drone components can enter Ukraine via third-party vendors,” he explains.

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University of Maryland engineering professor Houbing Herbert Song, who has researched anti-drone technology, tells WIRED that the products featured in the TikTok videos appear to be a combination of tracking equipment and jamming equipment, the latter of which distorts the signals drones use to operate.

Drones typically use radio waves to communicate with a remote operator. Some jammers work through sending out radio waves at the same frequency that the drone uses to operate, which may cause the drone i know contact its operator and leave it unresponsive. However, if the drone can still connect to a navigation system, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), some drones themselves can land or return to their starting point. Other jammers attempt to interfere with, or “spoof” the GPS signals that drones use to navigate. fraud the drone to think it’s somewhere else.