Tweets in Time of Conflict: A Public Dataset Tracking the Twitter Discourse on the War between Ukraine and Russia

Abstract

On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. In the days that followed, reports kept flooding in from laymen to news anchors of a conflict quickly escalating into war. Russia faced immediate backlash and condemnation from the world at large. While the war continues to contribute to an ongoing humanitarian and refugee crisis in Ukraine, a second battlefield has emerged in the online space, both in the use of social media to garner support for both sides of the conflict and also in the context of information warfare. In this paper, we present a collection of nearly half a billion tweets, from February 22, 2022, through January 8, 2023, that we are publishing for the wider research community to use. This dataset can be found at https://github.com/echen102/ukraine-russia. Our preliminary analysis on a subset of our dataset already shows evidence of public engagement with Russian state-sponsored media and other domains that are known to push unreliable information towards the beginning of the war; the former saw a spike in activity on the day of the Russian invasion, while the other saw spikes in engagement within the first month of the war. Our hope is that this public dataset can help the research community to further understand the ever-evolving role that social media plays in information dissemination, influence campaigns, grassroots mobilization, and much more, during a time of conflict.