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

“Peak, peck, peck!” a woman wearing 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 an oversized laser tag gun. “Jamming gun, good,” she adds, flashing a thumbs up. “Contact me!”

Today, almost every imaginable product is for sale on TikTok directly from Chinese factories, ranging from industrial chemicals to mystical crystals and custom pilates reformers. The app's offerings, it turns out, 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 showroom for a drone economy that power conflicts like Russia's war in Ukraine. Like to reach customers how they can, small Chinese drone manufacturers are publicly broadcasting tools of modern warfare, including anti-drone guns, jammers and sensors, but presenting 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 gumdrop-shaped dome on a tripod, a huge box “jamming gun,” and a backpack with 12 antennas. The titles on the videos are often in both Chinese and English, but others also include translations in Russian, Ukrainian or other languages. One video set to bouncy industrial house music features what the user labeled a “9 band FPV anti drone jammer,” a device used to disrupt and jam the radio and navigation signals that small drones use to communicate.

Drone Addiction

Both Russia and Ukraine have raced to expand domestic drone production and strengthen their defenses against drone attacks. But much of that manufacturing is still suspended Chinese components. Processors, sensors, speed controls, 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.

“Although Kyiv has tried to diversify away from Chinese sources, Ukraine still relies heavily on large Chinese companies for cheap drones and drone parts,” says 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 tightened these rules several times since the war in Ukraine began in early 2022. In September 2024, China the controls expanded to cover key parts needed to make battlefield drones, such as flight controls and motors. Around the same time, the US government announced it was sanctioning two Chinese companies for allegedly selling drone parts to Russia.

Despite the restrictions, trade figures suggest that Chinese drones continue to flow to Russia and Ukraine through intermediaries, Pusztaszer says. 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 – at closer to $1.1 billion. “That gap suggests that fully assembled Chinese drones and drone components could enter Ukraine through third-party sellers,” he explains.

Jamming on

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

Drones typically use radio waves to communicate with a remote operator. Some jammers continue to work broadcast radio waves on the same frequency that the drone uses to operate, which may cause the drone to to lose contact its operator and make it nonresponsive. However, if the drone can still connect to a navigation system, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), some drones can land themselves or return to their starting point. Other jammers try to interfere with the GPS signals that drones use to navigate, or “spoof” them, tricking the drone thinking it is somewhere else.