An Analysis of Twitter Discourse on the War Between Russia and Ukraine

Abstract: On the 21st of February 2022, Russia recognised the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic, three days before launching an invasion of Ukraine. Since then, an active debate has taken place on social media, mixing organic discussions with coordinated information campaigns. The scale of this discourse, alongside the role that information warfare has played in the invasion, make it vital to better understand this ecosystem. We therefore present a study of pro-Ukrainian vs. pro-Russian discourse through the lens of Twitter. We do so from two perspectives: (i) the content that is shared; and (ii) the users who participate in the sharing. We first explore the scale and nature of conversations, including analysis of hashtags, toxicity and media sharing. We then study the users who drive this, highlighting a significant presence of new users and bots.