In the Spotlight: The Russian Government's Use of Official Twitter Accounts to Influence Discussions About its War in Ukraine

Abstract

Russia's war in Ukraine has marked an inflection point for the future of the global order and democracy itself. Widely condemned for waging a war of aggression, the Russian government has used its official social media channels to spread disinformation as justification for the war. This study examines how the Russian government has used its official Twitter accounts to shape English-language conversations about the war in Ukraine. 2,685 English-language tweets posted by 70 Russian government accounts between 1 September 2022 and 31 January 2023 were analyzed using BERTopic. Initial topic analysis shows the Russian government portrayed itself as a noble world leader interested in peace and cooperation, while deflecting blame onto the “Kiev Regime” for starting the war. A semantic similarity analysis was then conducted to compare the narratives originating from Russian government Twitter accounts to 149,732 English-language tweets about the war in Ukraine to estimate these narratives’ spread. Results show a segment of general discussion tweets to exhibit strongly similar language to Russian government tweets, but also highlight differences between the frequency and saliency of Russian government narratives. This work contributes one of the first analyses of disinformation originating from official Russian government social media channels about the war in Ukraine.