Dr. Elizabeth Radziszewski
Introduction
This report is a companion study to START’s 2024 report, The Impact of Events in the War in Ukraine on Pro-Russian Narratives: The Case of Twitter, 1 which explored pro-Russian narratives in connection with three significant events in the war in 2022: the onset of the battle of Kherson, the Bucha massacre of civilians, and NATO’s announcement of membership offer to Sweden and Finland. That report reviewed existing insights on pro-Russian narratives—a tool of irregular warfare that a state can rely on to gain an edge over an adversary—and developed a set of testable hypotheses linked to the use of various themes in messages on social media platforms in the context of three events, with specific focus on expected changes in those themes before the onset of the event and after. The report also presented findings from statistical analysis in the context of Twitter. This study tests these hypotheses by focusing on Weibo and Telegram and concludes with a discussion of differences in the evolution of pro-Russian rhetoric between these social media platforms and Twitter.
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