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

TL;DR

This paper introduces a publicly available dataset of over 63 million tweets related to the Ukraine-Russia conflict, enabling research on social media's role in information warfare and public discourse during wartime.

Contribution

The paper provides a large, curated Twitter dataset covering the Ukraine-Russia war, along with preliminary analysis of engagement with unreliable sources and state-sponsored media.

Findings

Spike in activity for Russian state media on invasion day

Evidence of engagement with unreliable information sources

Public discourse heavily influenced by conflict events

Abstract

On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. In the days that followed, reports kept flooding in from layman 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 over 63 million tweets, from February 22, 2022 through March 8, 2022 that we are publishing for the wider research community to use. This dataset can be found at https://github.com/echen102/ukraine-russia and will be maintained and regularly updated as the war continues to unfold. Our preliminary analysis already shows evidence of public engagement with Russian state sponsored media and other domains that are known to push unreliable information; the former saw a spike in activity on the day of the Russian invasion. 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.