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#UkraineUnderAttack: External-Facing Communications during the 2014 war in Ukraine

Semester: Summer 2024


Presentation description

In 2014, the Ukrainian Revolution erupted after President Yanukovych rejected European Union integration in favor of aligning with Russia. These protests led to the Ukrainian Revolution and eventually Russia's annexation of Crimea. Soon after, pro-Ukrainian and separatist-aligned movements emerged, a division seen on social media platforms like Twitter, content of which this project analyzes. During this time, many Western audiences had little awareness of this conflict; consequently, each movement relied on various tools of communication to sway their audience over the other. Currently, much of the literature regarding online movements focuses on the contestation dynamics within particular national contexts; however, global, external-facing discursive activities of movements have gone largely underexamined. To address this gap, the project examines the external-facing communication from the pro-Ukrainian and pro-separatist movements during and after the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity in 2014. In this process, we utilize hashtag embedding methods to categorize tweets into pro-Ukrainian, pro-separatist, and neutral discourses, aiming to analyze outward-facing communication through the perspective of transnational social movements. We find that the pro-Ukrainian movement focused on garnering the support of Western audiences and dominated much of the conversations in our data. On the other hand, the pro-separatist movement directed their efforts to discourage pro-Ukrainian support from the West by framing the Ukrainian government as an oppressive regime. As these events were the precursor to the current war, understanding the dynamics of these two movements in 2014 is important to gaining insight into the current conflict.

Presenter Name: Sarah Choe
Presentation Type: Poster
Presentation Format: In Person
Presentation #11
College: Engineering
School / Department: School of Computing
Research Mentor: Marina Kogan
Time: 11:00 AM
Physical Location or Zoom link:

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