Solidarity boosts online virality in nation under attack, Ukrainian social media study finds

The first major study of social media behavior during wartime has found that posts celebrating national and cultural unity in a country under attack generate significantly more online engagement than posts derogatory about the aggressors.

Psychologists from the University of Cambridge analyzed a total of 1.6 million posts on Facebook and Twitter (now X) from Ukrainian media outlets in the seven months leading up to February 2022, when Russian forces invaded the country, and of the six months that followed.

Once the attempted invasion began, posts classified as expressing Ukrainian “in-group solidarity” were associated with 92% more engagement on Facebook and 68% more on Twitter than similar posts before the attack in large scale of Russia.

While posts expressing “out-group hostility” toward Russia received only 1% more engagement on Facebook after the invasion, with no significant difference on Twitter.

“Pro-Ukrainian sentiment, phrases such as Glory to Ukraine and posts about Ukrainian military heroism, gained huge amounts of likes and shares, but hostile posts aimed at Russia barely registered ” said Yara Kyrychenko of the Social Decision-Making Lab (SDML) in Cambridge. ) in its psychology department.

“The vast majority of social media research uses U.S. data, where controversial posts often go viral, prompting some researchers to suggest that these platforms foster polarization. In embattled Ukraine, we see the opposite,” said Kyrychenko, lead author. of the study published in Natural communications.

“Emotions that appeal to group identity can empower people and boost morale. These emotions may be more contagious and prompt greater engagement during times of active threat, when the motivation to behave in ways beneficial to his group is increased.”

Previous research from the same Cambridge lab found that going viral on American social media is driven by hostility: posts that mock and criticize opposing sides of ideological divides are far more likely to spark hostility. engagement and reach a wider audience.

The new study initially used the same techniques, revealing that before the invasion, social media posts from pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian news sources contained “outgroup” keywords (from opposing politicians, place names, etc.) actually generated more traction than posts containing “ingroup” keywords.

However, the researchers then trained a large language model (LLM) – a form of language processing AI, similar to ChatGPT – to better categorize the sentiments and motivation behind the post, rather than simply relying on keywords, and used it to analyze Facebook and Twitter posts from Ukrainian media before and after the invasion.

This deeper analysis revealed a consistently strong engagement rate for solidarity messages – higher than for “external hostility” – in the period leading up to the Russian attack, which increased further after the invasion, while interactions with mocking messages about Russia stagnate.

Finally, a separate dataset of 149,000 post-invasion tweets geolocated to Ukraine was fed into a similar LLM, in order to test this effect on social media posts from the Ukrainian population, rather than just news sources .

Tweets (now would probably only get a 7% increase.

“Social media platforms allow expressions of the national struggle that would otherwise have been deprived to reach millions of people,” Kyrychenko said.

“These moments echo the solidarity and resistance of a first-person narrative, which can make them more powerful than traditional media anchored in impersonal reporting.”

The researchers acknowledge that these trends may result from algorithms used by social media companies, but say that similar effects were detected on two separate platforms and with posts from both Ukrainian news sources and the Ukrainian population suggests that much of this information sharing dynamic is motivated. by people.

“The Kremlin has long tried to sow division in Ukraine, but fails to understand that the Euromaidan revolution and Russia’s attempted invasion have only spurred Ukrainian identity toward national unity,” he said. said Dr Jon Roozenbeek, lead author of the SDML study from Cambridge and King’s. College of London.

“We can trace through social media posts this fortification of the Ukrainian group’s identity in the face of extreme Russian aggression,” said Roozenbeek, who published the book Propaganda and Ideology in the Russian-Ukrainian War earlier This year.

Kyrychenko, a Cambridge Gates scholar born and raised in Kyiv, remembers the crucial role Facebook and Twitter played in the 2014 Euromaidan protests, some of which she participated in as a teenager, and her surprise at the attitude towards social media that she encountered during this period. United States after moving there to study in 2018, during the Trump presidency.

“By the time I arrived in the United States, social media was seen as toxic and divisive, whereas my experience of these platforms in Ukraine had been a force for positive political unity in the fight for democracy,” Kyrychenko said.

While Kyrychenko points out that hate speech and conspiracy theories still thrive online in Ukraine, she says the solidarity encouraged on social media reflects part of the initial promise these platforms represented to unite people against tyranny.

“The Ukrainian experience reminds us that social media can be used for good, pro-social causes, even in the most dire situations. »

Examples of social media posts that were part of the study dataset:

Examples of ingroup solidarity include:

• “Thank you to the KALUSH ORCHESTRA group for their support! Glory to Ukraine! 🇺🇦” received 4434 retweets.
• “Our flag will fly all over Ukraine, General Valery Zaluzhnyi said.” got 5577 favorites and 767 retweets.
• “Ukrainian soldiers congratulate students on September 1 and remember their first bells 💔🔔” … got 92,381 shares and 482,896 likes on Facebook.
• “In a Polish church they decided to sing the song “Oh, there is a red viburnum in the meadow” right during the service! 🇺🇦 ❤️🇵🇱” … got 34897 shares and 68847 likes on Facebook.

A more detailed description from lead author Yara Kyrychenko of an example of Ukrainian “ingroup solidarity” social media content:

• “On New Year’s Eve 2022, a family in the then recently deoccupied Ukrainian city of Kherson watched Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidential speech on WhatsApp with their relatives in the still-occupied territories.
• “A video of the entire family in tears – as Zelensky declares that Ukraine will liberate itself and rebuild itself – quickly went viral on all platforms. It captured something so powerful and so deeply moving that many people cry while watching it, even months later.
• “The feeling of unity despite barriers, the tender love of national tradition and human connection, all distilled into a single TikTok. Messages like these evoke similar feelings of solidarity among countless Ukrainians, even though each has seen a different face of the war. “.

Examples of out-group hostility include:

• “Boris Johnson: Negotiating with Putin is like negotiating with a crocodile” received 425 retweets and 4957 favorites.
• “It hurts to understand that these bastards shoot at absolutely everything. It doesn’t matter whether the soldiers are there or not. Hospitals, schools….” got 21,728 shares and 25,125 likes.
• “❗️Russians don’t want to fight for Putin. The story of a soldier captured in Kharkov. ‘Bastards! I hate them! They are spreading propaganda!'” … got 65,409 shares and 79,735 Likes .