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Telegram channels covering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: a comparative analysis of large multilingual corpora

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Abstract

Telegram channels are essential in covering Russia’s war in Ukraine. The article compares the war coverage by voenkory, military bloggers in Ukraine and Russia, with war-related news items disseminated by legacy media, both print and electronic (TV, online news portals). A corpus of political and media discourses about the war during its first year was content analyzed using a custom-built Ukrainian-Russian-English-French “dictionary of war.” The corpus contains sources from five countries: Ukraine, Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom and France, including the twenty most popular Telegram channels about the war in Ukraine and Russia (119 million words). The study demonstrates the potential of semi-supervised methods of content analysis for studying highly heterogeneous multi-language corpora. It shows how digital propaganda works in the case of war reporting. Military bloggers, actors of white propaganda, appear to outperform bots and throlls. The article also adds a comparative dimension to studies of social media. On the one hand, digital war reporting is compared with war reporting in legacy media. Russian voenkory discussed the invasion in greater technical detail than in national legacy media, whereas Ukrainian voenkory emphasized its ideological dimension more. On the other hand, the comparison extends to include several countries and periods. As the war unfolded, Ukrainian military bloggers’ coverage became less ideological and more technical, too.

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Data availability

Data in.ppj format is available upon request.

Notes

  1. For instance, Ukrainian respondents in the July 2022 survey were prompted to identify two principal sources, whereas no such restriction was imposed in the Russian poll.

  2. The list of banned internet resources is available at https://blocklist.rkn.gov.ru/.

  3. This list is appended to the Presidential decree from April 28, 2017 (https://www.president.gov.ua/documents/1332017-21850).

  4. Federal’nyi Zakon from March 4, 2022 No 32-FZ “O vnesenii izmenenii v Ugolovnyi kodeks Rossiiskoi Federatsii i stat’i 31 i 151 Ugolovno-processual’nogo kodeksa Rossiiskoi Federatsii” (http://publication.pravo.gov.ru/Document/View/0001202203040007).

  5. Zakon Ukraїny pro vnesennia zmin do deiakykh zakonodavchykh aktiv Ukraїny shchodo posylennia krymynal’noї vidpovidal’nosti za vygotovlennia ta poshyrennia zaboronenoї informatsiinoї produktsiї (https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/2110-20#Text).

  6. Zakon Ukraїny pro vnesennia zmin do Krymynal’nogo ta Krymynal’nogo processual’nogo kodelsiv Ukraїny shchodo zabezpechennia protydiї nesanktsionovannomu poshyrenniu informatsiї pro napravlennia, peremishchennia zbroї, ozbroennia to boiovykh prypasiv… (https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/2160-%D0%86%D0%A5#Text).

  7. The survey included the open-ended question: "In your view, why did Russia start the special military operation in Ukraine?" Answers to this question were content analyzed using the same dictionary as in the other cases. The authors are grateful to Prof. Lev Gudkov, director of Levada Center, for his kind permission to reuse this data.

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The author is grateful to two Journal of Computational Social Science reviewers for their comments and helpful suggestions.

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    Anton Oleinik

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Oleinik, A. Telegram channels covering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: a comparative analysis of large multilingual corpora. J Comput Soc Sc (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42001-023-00240-9

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