A Reddit Dataset for the Russo-Ukrainian Conflict in 2022

Abstract

Reddit consists of sub-communities that cover a focused topic. This paper provides a list of relevant subreddits for the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian crisis. We perform an exhaustive subreddit exploration using keyword search and shortlist 12 subreddits as potential candidates that contain nominal discourse related to the crisis. These subreddits contain over 300,000 posts and 8 million comments collectively. We provide an additional categorization of content into two categories, "R-U Conflict", and "Military Related", based on their primary focus. We further perform content characterization of those subreddits. The results show a surge of posts and comments soon after Russia launched the invasion. "Military Related" posts are more likely to receive more replies than "R-U Conflict" posts. Our textual analysis shows an apparent preference for the Pro-Ukraine stance in "R-U Conflict", while "Military Related" retain a neutral stance.

A Longitudinal Study of Italian and French Reddit Conversations Around the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

“…They observed how hope spiked positively in case of important victories of the Ukrainian resistance and non-military related events, while it spiked negatively in the correspondence of relevant strategic losses. Lastly, we report several datasets published [9,15,21,26,32]…”

Ukrainian Thoughts and Feelings based on One Year War Content Analysis

“…The authors frame the discourses tackled by both communities and position topics regarding morality, fairness, legality, and crime in the independent sphere, and topics regarding capacity and external in the state-affiliated sphere. Zhu et al (2022) propose a Reddit dataset containing more than 300.000 posts between February 24 to May 29, 2022. The study classifies the content as being related to this conflict or general military related.…”

“…During this war, Telegram represents the unconventional social media platform that most quickly rose in popularity and use due to its various channels (Nazaruk, 2022) and its power to provide the latest information about various war aspects (Ptaszek, Yuskiv & Khomych, 2023). However, while dedicated efforts to understanding discourses and emotions of users in other social media platforms like Twitter exist, a limited body of studies is directed to unconventional social media platforms like Telegram and TikTok (Zhu et al, 2022). This creates a gap in understanding these through such platforms (Steel, Parker & Ruths, 2023) and without tackling them, the spread of social media manipulation increases (Ye et al, 2023).…”

IsamasRed: A Public Dataset Tracking Reddit Discussions on Israel-Hamas Conflict

“…Another ongoing geopolitical conflict with roots in the early 20th century is the Ukraine-Russia Conflict, which escalated in 2022 with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Existing works have collected extensive social media tweets to facilitate research into various aspects of the conflict, such as social media influence, public engagement, content moderation, and the evolution of conflict narratives (Chen and Ferrara 2023;Pohl et al 2023;Zhu et al 2022;Shi, Chen, and Zhao 2023). Guerra and Karakus ¸(2023) propose a lexicon-based unsupervised sentiment analysis method to measure hope and fear for the conflict using data from Reddit.…”

“…When collecting a dataset of public online discussions, researchers use keywords to target data collection to relevant discussions from among the vast volume of message posted online (Chen et al 2020;Zhu et al 2022;Chang et al 2023;Chen and Ferrara 2023). However, the keywords used for retrieving messages are usually chosen manually, in an ad hoc manner, which risks biasing data collection.…”