Narratives of War: Ukrainian Memetic Warfare on Twitter

TL;DR

This paper analyzes Ukrainian memetic warfare on Twitter during the 2022 invasion, highlighting how narratives influence engagement and the role of official and independent accounts in wartime communication.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of memetic narratives in wartime social media, revealing their impact on engagement and the strategic use of victim and enemy narratives by Ukrainian accounts.

Findings

Tweets with 'victim' narratives receive twice as many retweets

Malevolent enemy narratives resonate more than heroism or victim stories

Official Ukrainian accounts effectively use memes for wartime communication

Abstract

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has seen an intensification in the use of social media by governmental actors in cyber warfare. Wartime communication via memes has been a successful strategy used not only by independent accounts such as @uamemesforces, but also-for the first time in a full-scale interstate war-by official Ukrainian government accounts such as @Ukraine and @DefenceU. We study this prominent example of memetic warfare through the lens of its narratives, and find them to be a key component of success: tweets with a 'victim' narrative garner twice as many retweets. However, malevolent narratives focusing on the enemy resonate more than those about heroism or victims with countries providing more assistance to Ukraine. Our findings present a nuanced examination of Ukraine's influence operations and of the worldwide response to it, thus contributing new insights into the evolution of socio-technical systems in times of war.