The Impact of Russia’s Nuclear Threats on Ukraine War Narratives on English, French, and German Social Media

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Jisoo Kim, whose interest is in the shaping of communication flows about Ukraine across English, French, and German communities. Such efforts are part of information warfare, aiming to win the battle for public opinion and perception; Russia, in particular, is employing state media and troll armies to disseminate its propaganda about the causes and progress of its war against Ukraine. More recently, this has also include nuclear threats, rhetoric, and diplomacy.

The present study examines this with a particular view to cross-platform content flows and time-series analysis of the distribution of narratives, across Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit and across content in English, French, and German. Part of the question here is now transnational these narratives have become.

The project, then, gathered posts from these three platforms between November 2021 and November 2022, divided into phases before and after April 2022 (when the Ukrainian counteroffensive began). Favouring narratives here urged western nations to fight Russian aggression and highlighted the need for a proactive western response; opposing narratives highlighted fears of nuclear war and attempted to offer justifications for Russia’s invasion. Neutral narratives focussed on the relation between the war and domestic politics in relevant countries, or reported on the progress of the war.

English and French results were quite strikingly different here. In English, YouTube and Reddit featured justification themes; Twitter urged the west to fight during the first phase. In French, fear of nuclear war was the major theme on all platforms. Across platforms and languages, the nuclear threat dampened the visibility of content urging Europe to fight in Phase 1, while in Phase 2 domestic politics came to dominate. Multi-platform interactions showed that urge to fight discourses on YouTube and Twitter were closely correlated, while justification narratives were not.

In Phase 1, nuclear threats weakened the resolve to confront Russia, and in Phase 2 this led to a greater focus on domestic affairs and away from the war effort itself. Cross-platform coordination was more pronounced for anti-Russian themes than for pro-Russian themes, at least in English.