Happenstance: Utilizing Semantic Search to Track Russian State Media Narratives about the Russo-Ukrainian War On Reddit

Abstract

In the buildup to and in the weeks following the Russian Federation's invasion of Ukraine, Russian disinformation outlets output torrents of misleading and outright false information.In this work, we study the coordinated information campaign to understand the most prominent disinformation narratives touted by the Russian government to English-speaking audiences. To do this, we first perform sentence-level topic analysis using the large-language model MPNet on articles published by nine different Russian disinformation websites and the new Russian "fact-checking" website waronfakes.com. We show that smaller websites like katehon.com were highly effective at producing topics that were later echoed by other disinformation sites. After analyzing the set of Russian information narratives, we analyze their correspondence with narratives and topics of discussion on the r/Russia and 10 other political subreddits. Using MPNet and a semantic search algorithm, we map these subreddits' comments to the set of topics extracted from our set of disinformation websites, finding that 39.6% of r/Russia comments corresponded to narratives from Russian disinformation websites, compared to 8.86% on r/politics.

A Study of Partisan News Sharing in the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

“…To reduce such an effect, some researchers have characterized the propagation of partisan news (Zannettou et al 2019a;Bobichev, Kanishcheva, and Cherednichenko 2017), tracing the source of such propagation (Karamshuk et al 2016). Hanley et al (Hanley, Kumar, and Durumeric 2022) has taken a closer look at partisan news sharing on r/russia, a Reddit Russian community. They reveal that, during the Russian invasion, comments in r/russia present more leaning to partisan news from Russian state media.…”

“…As reported in (Tkachenko and Guo 2019;, these three subreddits produce event-oriented conversation during the ongoing political conflict between Ukraine and Russia. In addition, recent literature has uncovered the widespread sharing of partisan news content in these subreddits (Hanley, Kumar, and Durumeric 2022). Thus, we consider these three subreddits suitable sources to conduct our analysis.…”

A Reddit Dataset for the Russo-Ukrainian Conflict in 2022

“…For the COVID-19 crisis, Cinelli provided a comparative analysis of users' activity on five different social media platforms and built a model to analyze information spread [27]. Regarding the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian Conflict, Hanley has analyzed Russian disinformation narratives utilizing semantic search [28]. Such works depend on reliable and comprehensive datasets.…”

Slovak MPs’ response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine in light of conspiracy theories and the polarization of political discourse

“…The narratives blamed NATO for the invasion, and were spread across social media including Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. The narratives were then shared by various local actors in the European countries (Alieva et al, 2022;Hanley et al, 2022;Marušiak, 2023). A narrative about a US-backed biological weapons lab being built in Ukraine gained prominence on Twitter in the days following the invasion (Pohl et al, 2023).…”