The Role of Twitter and Google Trends in Identifying the Perception of Russia-Ukraine Wars

Abstract

[EN] The COVID-19 pandemic has not only changed the social reality we were used to but also confirmed how data is one of the most valuable resources. We examine the search volume of Google Trends to understand the perception of the war in Ukraine based on people's online information search behaviour and Twitter to figure out how people discuss, react and respond to emergent phenomena from complex events like a war. The data collected from Twitter shows that the public reaction to the events of the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war was diverse, with a large proportion of tweets expressing negative sentiment (≃81%) towards the events. We also show that the use of hashtags such as #NuclearThreat and #RussiaUkraineWar was prevalent during the escalation of the conflict in 2022, indicating that these events were widely discussed on Twitter. The use of these keywords and hashtags can provide a better understanding of how the war is being portrayed in the media and perceived by the general public in pseudo real-time. In order to effectively utilise these data sources, researchers should utilise a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, including natural language processing and sentiment analysis.