‘Pew Pew’: The Chinese Companies Marketing Anti-Drone Weapons on TikTok

“Bench, bench, bench!” » says a woman wearing sneakers and high-waisted pink pants happily in a video uploaded to TikTok. She stands on what appears to be an industrial roof and demonstrates how to use a black device resembling an oversized laser gun. “Gun jamming, good,” she adds with a thumbs up. “Contact me!”

These days, almost every product imaginable is available for purchase on TikTok directly from Chinese factories, ranging from industrial chemicals to mystical crystals and custom Pilates reformers. It appears the app’s offerings 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 fuels conflicts like Russia’s war in Ukraine. Eager to reach customers however they can, China’s small drone makers are publicly releasing tools of modern warfare, including anti-drone guns, jammers and sensors, but with the lighthearted pace of consumer lifestyle advertising. The result is a surreal combination of e-commerce and battlefield combat.

WIRED reviewed dozens of videos from TikTok accounts claiming to sell various types of anti-drone equipment, including products that resemble a gumball-shaped dome on a tripod, a huge square “jamming gun,” and a backpack with 12 antennas. Video subtitles are often in Chinese and English, but others also include translations into Russian, Ukrainian, or other languages. A video set to bouncy industrial house music features what the user called a “9-band FPV anti-drone jammer,” a device used to disrupt and block radio and navigation signals that small drones use to communicate.

Drone dependencies

Russia and Ukraine have rushed to expand their domestic drone production and strengthen their defenses against drone attacks. But much of this manufacturing still relies on Chinese components. The processors, sensors, speed controllers, cameras and radio modules on both sides of the war come largely from the same clusters of factories in and around Shenzhen, China’s hardware manufacturing capital.

“Even though kyiv has tried to diversify away from Chinese sources, Ukraine still relies heavily on large Chinese companies for its cheap drones and spare parts,” says Aosheng Pusztaszeri, a research associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies focused on emerging technologies and national security.

Beijing restricts exports of technology for civilian and military purposes, including drones and related components, and has tightened these rules several times since the start of the war in Ukraine in early 2022. In September 2024, China expanded controls to cover key parts needed to make battlefield drones, such as flight controllers and motors. Around the same time, the U.S. government announced it was sanctioning two Chinese companies for allegedly selling drone parts to Russia.

Despite the restrictions, trade figures suggest that Chinese drones continued to flow to Russia and Ukraine through intermediaries, Pusztaszer says. In the first half of 2024, Chinese companies officially sold only $200,000 worth of drones to kyiv. But the Ukrainian government puts forward a much higher estimate, closer to $1.1 billion. “This gap suggests that fully assembled Chinese drones and drone components could enter Ukraine through third-party sellers,” he explains.

Jamming enabled

Houbing Herbert Song, an engineering professor at the University of Maryland who has studied anti-drone technology, told WIRED that the products shown in the TikTok videos appear to be a combination of sensing 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 by transmitting radio waves at the same frequency the drone uses to operate, which can cause the drone to lose contact with its operator and become unresponsive. However, while the drone can still connect to a navigation system, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), some drones can land or return to their starting point. Other jammers attempt to interfere with or “spoof” the GPS signals that drones use to navigate, making the drone think it is somewhere else.