Cross-Platform Digital Discourse Analysis of the Israel-Hamas Conflict: Sentiment, Topics, and Event Dynamics
Despoina Antonakaki, Sotiris Ioannidis

TL;DR
This study analyzes how the Israel-Hamas conflict is discussed across Telegram, Twitter, and Reddit, revealing platform-specific narratives, emotional dynamics, and propaganda strategies through advanced text analysis methods.
Contribution
It introduces a multi-platform, FAIR-compliant dataset and an integrated analysis pipeline for large-scale conflict discourse, providing new empirical insights into digital conflict communication.
Findings
Persistent negative sentiment across platforms
Strong humanitarian framing and solidarity expressions
Platform-specific pathways for narrative diffusion
Abstract
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains one of the most polarizing geopolitical issues, with the October 2023 escalation intensifying online debate. Social media platforms, particularly Telegram, have become central to real-time news sharing, advocacy, and propaganda. In this study, we analyze Telegram, Twitter/X, and Reddit to examine how conflict narratives are produced, amplified, and contested across different digital spheres. Building on our previous work on Telegram discourse during the 2023 escalation, we extend the analysis longitudinally and cross-platform using an updated dataset spanning October 2023 to mid-2025. The corpus includes more than 187,000 Telegram messages, 2.1 million Reddit comments, and curated Twitter/X posts. We combine Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), BERTopic, and transformer-based sentiment and emotion models to identify dominant themes, emotional…
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Taxonomy
TopicsPublic Relations and Crisis Communication · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Computational and Text Analysis Methods
