Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Meme Warfare
Ukraine Conflict
Global Impact
Narratives of War: Ukrainian Memetic Warfare on Twitter
🤖 AI Summary
This study investigates how Ukrainian state and civilian Twitter accounts waged a national-level digital narrative campaign during the 2022 Russia–Ukraine war using memes, and assesses its impact on global public opinion and international aid. Drawing on publicly available Twitter data, it employs narrative typology coding (e.g., “victim,” “adversary”), regression analysis, and cross-national aid data linkage modeling to systematically examine the differential communicative efficacy and diplomatic utility of distinct wartime narratives—a first in the literature. Results indicate that “victim”-framed tweets generated approximately twice the retweet volume, whereas “adversary”-framed content—emphasizing enemy atrocities—significantly predicted higher levels of tangible support from donor countries. The study establishes an empirically grounded analytical framework for evaluating digital narrative efficacy in armed conflict, offering novel evidence and methodological foundations for understanding symbolic politics and soft power dynamics in contemporary hybrid warfare.
📝 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.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Emoticons in Warfare
Narrative Strategies
Impact on Information Warfare
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