THE UKRAINIAN CRISIS ON TWITTER: SENTIMENT ANALYSIS – POSSIBLE INTERPRETATIONS

Abstract

The mass use of social media has enabled users to reach out and share opinions, attitudes, and emotions on various topics - current events in particular - almost instantly. In this paper, we analyze the attitudes of Serbian speakers toward Russia and Russians during the ongoing war in Ukraine, based on the material obtained using an application for collecting and processing comments on Twitter. The study covers the period from February to September 2022. Starting with the assumption that Twitter users tend to be freer and more spontaneous in expressing their views compared to users of other social media (Facebook, Instagram, etc.), about 11,000 tweets were collected using the BigBoxData application based on keywords (Russia, Ukraine, war, special operation, Putin, Zelensky...), and were subsequently manually filtered and annotated. The goal was to find out if and how the attitudes of Serbian speakers toward Russia and Russians have changed with the ongoing war in Ukraine compared to associations and stereotypes toward Russia and Russians reported in previous papers. The combination of qualitative (positive, negative, and neutral sentiment) and quantitative (percentage share of each of the three sentiments) sentiment analysis showed that the attitudes of Serbian speakers toward Russia and Russians have changed compared to the previous period (using as a reference the Associative Dictionary of the Serbian language and the Reverse associative dictionary of the Serbian language, both of which report extremely positive associations). The methods used in this study and the research results can serve for further research and attitude change within the crisis discourse on social media and the Internet in general. Keywords: crisis discourse, social media, stereotypes