This is the code for the paper Russian propaganda on social media during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Dominique Geissler, Dominik Bär, Nicolas Pröllochs, and Stefan Feuerriegel.
The code has been tested on Python 3.9
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was accompanied by a large-scale propaganda campaign. Here, we analyze the spread of Russian propaganda on social media. For this, we collected N = 349,455 messages from Twitter with pro-Russian content. Our findings suggest that pro-Russian messages were mainly disseminated through a systematic, coordinated propaganda campaign. Overall, pro-Russian content received ∼251,000 retweets and thereby reached around 14.4 million users, primarily in countries such as India, South Africa, and the United States. We further provide evidence that bots played a disproportionate role in the dissemination of propaganda and amplified its proliferation. Overall, 20.28% of the spreaders are classified as bots, most of which were created in the beginning of the invasion. Together, our results highlight the new threats to society that originate from coordinated propaganda campaigns on social media in modern warfare. Our results also suggest that curbing bots may be an effective strategy to mitigate such campaigns.
russian_propaganda.ipynb: Jupyter Notebook that contains code to generate all the figures in the main text and supplementary information.
data: Folder to store the data used for the figures in.
networks: Folder to store the Gephi files for the network figures in.