Public Opinion in Conflict Situations: A Sentiment Analysis of Tweets About Russia During the War on Ukraine

ABSTRACT

Wars not only bring death and suffering to the conflicting parties, but they can also trigger a spiral of negative emotions in the countries observing the conflict. This study examines global public opinion at the start of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 by analyzing comments about Russia on X (formerly Twitter) in 127 countries. Using Python, the sentiment levels (positive, negative, neutral) of a total sample of 429,408 tweets in 48 languages were estimated. In addition to quantifying a net sentiment index for each country, the study focuses on the possible existence of differences in terms of military, political and cultural factors. The results show that sentiment towards Russia after the invasion was negative in most countries around the world, although there were significant differences between opinions in NATO countries and those allied with Russia. Additionally, public opinion was less negative in individualistic countries compared to those with collectivist societies.

KEYWORDS:

• Sentiment analysis
• public opinion
• Russia
• Ukraine
• war
• Twitter/X

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Twitter was renamed ‘X’ at the end of July 2023. The terms ‘Twitter’ (X) and ‘tweet’ (post) are used in this manuscript, as some readers may still be more familiar with the former expressions.

2. The main codes used in this study (Tweet Extraction and Sentiment Analysis) are available in the Appendix. The dataset (tweets IDs) can be downloaded from the Harvard Dataverse repository (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Government of Aragón (GENERES Group S-54_20R) co-financed by FEDER 2014-2020 ‘Building Europe from Aragón’ and IUI en Empleo, Sociedad Digital y Sostenibilidad (IEDIS).