My war is your special operation: Engagement with pro- and anti-regime framing of the war in Ukraine on Russian social media

Abstract

On 24 February 2022, Russia launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine which since then has been consistently referred to by the Russian authorities as a special operation and not war. The purpose of this specific framing of the Russian aggression can be attributed to multiple reasons, but among the main advantages it provides to the Kremlin is the emphasis of power inequality between Russia and Ukraine as well as minimizing the concerns of the Russian population about the impact of the war on their lives. However, despite all the Kremlin’s propaganda and censorship efforts, it is still unclear what the dominant framing of the war is among regular Russian internet users and how they engage with different frames used in relation to it. To address this gap, we conducted an automated analysis of over 6 million public posts from VK, the biggest Russian social media platform, published between 14 February 2022 and 24 June 2022 and related to different ways of framing the war as well as the ways users engage with these frames. Our analysis reveals that the invasion was predominantly discussed in connection with the losses in the Russian army, and allusions to WW2 were also common. The users who posted about the war were older than average VK users and tuned in to pro-regime and pro-war content more frequently.

#Azovsteel: Comparing qualitative and quantitative approaches for studying framing of the siege of Mariupol on Twitter

“…In particular, in the case of quantitative approaches, it is important to take into consideration more complex approaches, such as, for instance, the transformer-based ones which showed its applicability for studying the framing of the war in Ukraine on social media (e.g. Urman and Makhortykh, 2022). Another limitation concerns our exclusive focus on English tweets, whereas the comprehensive assessment of the framing of Russia’s war in Ukraine on social media would require taking into consideration content in Ukrainian and Russian.…”

“…Makhortykh and Sydorova, 2017) to discourse analysis (Gaufman, 2015(Gaufman, , 2022 to transformer-based computational models for text summarisation (e.g. Urman and Makhortykh, 2022).…”

“…By contrast, there are relatively few studies looking at how the war is framed on social media platforms: the majority of them focus on regional platforms, such as VK (e.g. Gaufman, 2015; Makhortykh and Sydorova, 2017; Urman and Makhortykh, 2022), whereas the role of Western platforms such as Twitter remains less studied (for an exception, see Pantti, 2019).…”

“…However, despite the usefulness of qualitative approaches, their application is limited by the relatively small samples of data to which these approaches can be feasibly applied. By contrast, quantitative approaches, such as topic modelling (Urman and Makhortykh, 2022), can be applied to large datasets, but the resulting observations often have lesser interpretative value, in particular in terms of framing analysis. Under these circumstances, there is a need to compare what insights about war framing can be generated by different approaches and how comparable they are.…”

“…Twitter and Facebook) also played a major role in informing the public about the course of the war. The Russian invasion has also been extensively discussed on both Western (Chen and Ferrara, 2022) and Russian social media platforms (Urman and Makhortykh, 2022). Similar to other recent wars (e.g.…”