Narratives of War: Ukrainian Memetic Warfare on Twitter
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2023
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| _version_ | 1866910790590660608 |
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| author | Mejova, Yelena Capozzi, Arthur Monti, Corrado Morales, Gianmarco De Francisci |
| author_facet | Mejova, Yelena Capozzi, Arthur Monti, Corrado Morales, Gianmarco De Francisci |
| contents | 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. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_08363 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2023 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Narratives of War: Ukrainian Memetic Warfare on Twitter Mejova, Yelena Capozzi, Arthur Monti, Corrado Morales, Gianmarco De Francisci Computers and Society Human-Computer Interaction Social and Information Networks J.4; K.4 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. |
| title | Narratives of War: Ukrainian Memetic Warfare on Twitter |
| topic | Computers and Society Human-Computer Interaction Social and Information Networks J.4; K.4 |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.08363 |