Zelensky's leadership in Telegram and its impact on citizens: internationalisation, mobilisation and emotions in the Ukrainian war (original) (raw)
Related papers
2024
In the contemporary global context, characterized by political crises and a weakened democracy due to the impact of populism and disinformation, the Russian invasion of Ukraine poses a new challenge to the public sphere. The social, economic, and geopolitical ramifications of the conflict at a global level remain uncertain. However, public perception has been influenced by new forms of leadership and emotion-based communication. This research employs a content analysis methodology to examine the digital discourse of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the Telegram platform during the first year of the war. This messaging network promotes one-way communication, immediacy, and access to active follower communities. The results from analyzing his 2,089 posts demonstrate the predominance of strategies directed towards the internationalisation of the conflict and mobilizing support of Ukraine. Furthermore, the analysis of emotions reveals the presence of values such as gratitude, hope, and pride, aimed at constructing Zelensky’s image as a heroic figure in the digitised society of the 21st century.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, President Zelensky has used his social networks to request international support. This research analyzes the audiovisual discourse of the hegemonic networks during the first 40 days of the humanitarian war crisis in the context of risk communication. The contribution of this research relates to the unveiling of a new era where social media platforms are no longer the underdog of traditional media. This paper analyzes the visual content of President Zelensky's most followed social media profile, Instagram. This paper builds on previous work examining the political leaders of the most affected European countries during the first days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and how they enhanced the use of their social media profiles in order to communicate about the crisis. In contrast to the use of social media during the COVID-19 pandemic, the audiovisual narrative created by the president of Ukraine optimized the social network's resources and achieved an impactful and authentic approach to leadership during the first 40 days of crisis.
American social media on the Russia-Ukraine war: A multimodal analysis
Cognition, communication, discourse, 2022
This research focuses on political narrative about the Russia-Ukraine war in American social media. It aims to investigate the type and configuration of multimodal semiotic resources used to present the events of this war and shape their perception by the audience, primarily American; The New York Times Telegram channel coverage of the 2022 Russian invasion as a case study. What kind of semiotic resources do American social media deploy to construct the narrative about the war? What are the dominant post formats, how they deploy information about the Russia-Ukraine war and construe its perception: the concepts of the WAR, of UKRAINE as a victim of aggression and a fighter for independence, of RUSSIA as a terrorist-state, and of their ALLIES and OPPONENTS? Theoretically, this study is underpinned by a cognitive-semiotic, political linguistic and multimodal approach. In political media narrative, storytelling shapes perception of war realities: it frames and reframes the readers' construal of the world, ascribes connotations to facts and events. A multimodal narrative involves different semiotic resources-verbal, graphic, audial, and cinematographic (in video). The configuration of these heterogeneous signs in a particular Telegram channel's post defines its influence as predominantly rational or emotional. The findings show that the following post formats are typical for The New York Times Telegram channel: image followed by text and link to another site (the most frequent); gallery (a gallery of images) and quote (a quotation with its source/author as the title) (less frequent); video and audio (rarely used). They serve to accentuate, elaborate, and extend the information in the post. I argue that Telegram posts together with users' emoji-reactions are a specific interactive genre of a multimodal political discourse. Emojis realize both pragmatic and cognitive functions: on the one hand, they are effective instruments to measure users' reaction; on the other, they contribute to meaning-making by evaluating and making salient the concepts described. The dominance of rational and verified information in The New York Times Telegram channel creates the true image of Russia's genocidal WAR against Ukraine and provides a fair assessment of related concepts.
Vivat Academia. Revista de Comunicación
This paper studies the online communication strategies of world leaders during the war in Ukraine from February 24, 2022, to January 23, 2023. To analyze the collected data, various qualitative and quantitative methods such as content and sentiment analysis were used. The findings indicate that the majority of world leaders communicate via Twitter, and their tweets are mainly positive in tone. The most active communication strategies involve using hashtags related to the issues of the war, retweeting messages from other leaders, and issuing statements about the conflict. The results suggest that the participating leaders position themselves as the voice of the nation and emphasize the importance of international solidarity in achieving peace. Furthermore, the study reveals that the leaders are highly engaged in bidirectional communication, with the majority of messages focused on people's safety and the need for a diplomatic solution. The findings of this study could help policy...
Telegram in Belarusian Protests of 2020: Affective Tool for Populist's Uprisings
Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media (digitalicons.org), 2023
Certain political uprisings might be associated with this or that particular digital platform (for example, 'Arab spring' and Twitter). The 2020-2021 Belarusian protest is well-known for the popularity of Telegram messenger among the peaceful protesters. This large-scale and longest uprising in Belarusian history might be well described as 'Telegramrevolution' in future. This article looks into the role of Telegram messenger in mediating the protests to the wider public. The notion of populism by Ernesto Laclau is employed to describe the agenda of the Belarusian protest, which united wide masses of the population against the common enemy, at the same time lacking a strong positive agenda. Paradoxically, two of the most prominent events in the history of Belarusian politics can be described as populist's in Laclau's sense. It was the election of Lukashenko in 1994 and protests against him in 2020. Affect here is understood as a specific means with which the users of Belarusian Telegram were involved in populist protest of 2020. It operates outside the rational way of understanding politics, emphasising the intensity of involvement itself. The article explores the affective involvement of Belarusian Telegram users in protests of 2020.
First Six Months of War from Ukrainian topic and sentiment analysis
European Conference on Social Media
Through technological advancements as well as due to societal trends and developments, social media became an active part and a catalysator of the ongoing conflicts and wars carried out in the physical environment. A direct example on this behalf are the cyber/information operations currently conducted in conjunction with the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war. Due to such operations packaged in social media manipulation mechanisms like disinformation and misinformation using techniques such as controversies, fake news, and deep fakes, a high degree of confusion and uncertainty surrounds the events happened and users’ behaviour and beliefs. These operations also impact the civilians directly affected in the battlefield or their dear and known ones. To tackle this issue, currently limited scientific and objective effort is dedicated in this direction due to, e.g., data, strategic, and emotional implications. It is then the aim of this research to capture the main topics discussed and the ...
Messaging Strategies of Ukraine and Russia on Telegram during the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine
Research Square (Research Square), 2022
The popularity of the instant messaging app Telegram in Ukraine and Russia was strong even before the still-ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, since 24 February 2022 (when the Russian invasion began), it has seen huge increases in subscribers and even become the primary communication and news source in Ukraine. In this exploratory research, we analysed Telegram channels from both Ukraine (@UkraineNow-the official channel of the Ukrainian government, and @V_Zelen-skiy_official-the official channel of Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy) and Russia (@rt_russian-the official channel of the news network RT) to discern the content of posts during this invasion. Our analysis of 37,172 posts in total showed that while @UkraineNow is particularly being used to communicate invasion-related news, @rt_russian is working as merely an extension of RT, which is part of the pro-Kremlin propaganda and disinformation ecosystem. However, Zelenskyy has opted for a completely different approach: he has used his Telegram channel to encourage Ukrainians and garner support from the World. The present conflict is at a critical juncture, and our timely research seeks to determine how both countries' governments are utilizing Telegram as a weapon for the information war and what impact this has on ground.
Collective Action on Facebook and Telegram During the Russia–Ukraine War
European Conference on Social Media
Social media have been used for political bottom-up organizing and collective action since at least the Arab Spring protests. Social media provide unique affordances that reduce the costs of collective action facilitating anonymous communication and cooperation at a much larger scale than ever before. The Russian invasion of Ukraine provides multiple examples of social media use for collective action. In this conflict, social media platforms, most prominently Facebook and Telegram have been actively employed by Ukrainians as places for organisation, volunteering and gathering support from a variety of volunteers both inside the country and abroad. After nine months of the war, it can safely be said that volunteering has played a huge role in the resistance to Russian aggression. However, little is known about how collective action has been organised on social media during this conflict. This paper aims to advance knowledge on the subject by focusing on how different forms of collect...
The War in Ukraine: Rethinking Values in Communications
Current Issues of Mass Communication, 2022
This material is submitted for discussion on the pages of the journal. It has the status of a working version, a draft of a possible article, a preprint. Anyone can participate in the discussion by submitting their materials with a link to this material in the "Discussions" section of the following issues. The author of the same material, in the case of writing a scientific article, must make a reference to his material, which he submitted for discussion. The draft article is devoted to the online speech by the author at The 29th International Public Relations Research Symposium (BledCom) (Slovenia)
Twitter · Conflict · Crisis communication · Text analysis · Online information extraction, 2023
The purpose of the study is to explore and analyze the opinions of people associated with the Ukraine-Russia conflict expressed via User Generated Content (UGC), i.e., tweets and their influence on digital social circles. The "Twitter streaming application programming interface" (API) was used to retrieve the tweets against Ukraine-Russia conflict. The data were collected on March 31st, 2022, and analyzed using a mixed-methods approach. The content analysis of tweets was carried out to interpret and code the content of tweets. The geographical location of users was identified by accessing the profile of every user and the location mentioned by users on their profiles was looked up on the Internet to determine the precise location so that the data can be categorized through the country. To assess the impact of tweets, the engagement metrics (likes and Retweets) were taken into consideration as both the engagement metrics are treated as endorsements or acknowledgments on social media. The stated hypothesis is tested by performing an independent sample Z-test and analysis of variance (ANOVA) test on different variables of the study. The content analysis of the tweets highlights that Twitterers have varied opinions toward the Ukraine-Russia conflict, with a majority of tweets expressing support for Ukraine, followed distantly by the ones that ask for fundraising and donations for the distressed people of Ukraine and tweets that express descent toward Russia. As far as the geographical mapping of the tweets is concerned the tweets were posted around the globe, with an immense contribution from the USA, followed by Ukraine, United Kingdom and Canada, respectively. According to the credibility of Twitter accounts, it is found that unverified users posted the majority of tweets. However, the tweets posted by verified users have a more significant impact than those posted by unverified accounts by earning the most online attention score in terms of likes and retweets. Moreover, no significant difference between the format, gender groups and impact of tweets is found so it signifies that the format and gender of a tweet do not influence the engagement metrics of tweets. The research illustrates the diverse opinions of Twitter users on the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The study offers valuable insights on how online studies can be structured for information seeking and analysis to acquire exciting insights about the conflict.