Analyzing the worldwide perception of the Russia-Ukraine conflict through Twitter

Abstract In this paper, we analyze the worldwide perception of the Russia-Ukraine conflict (RU conflict for short) on the Twitter platform. The study involved collecting over 17 million tweets written in 63 different languages and conducting a multi-language sentiment analysis, as well as an analysis of their geographical distribution and verification of their temporal relationship to daily events. Additionally, the study focused on analyzing the accounts producing pro-conflict tweets to evaluate the possible presence of bots. The results of the analysis showed that the war had a significant global impact on Twitter, with the volume of tweets increasing as the war’s threats materialized. There was a strong correlation between the succession of events, the volume of tweets, and the prevalence of a specific sentiment. Most tweets had a negative sentiment, while tweets with positive sentiment mainly contained support and hope for people directly involved in the conflict. Moreover, a bot detection analysis performed on the collected tweets revealed the presence of many accounts spreading tweets including pro-conflict hashtags that cannot be identified as real users. Overall, this study sheds light on the importance of social media in shaping public opinion during conflicts and highlights the need for reliable methods to detect bots.