The Internet Frontline: How Narratives of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict Compete on Social Media

Many believe the media serves as a channel for elites to disseminate their political messages to a wide audience in the mass media era. With few alternative political information sources, citizens are often exposed to information modification and manipulation.

However, recent social movements have successfully leveraged social media platforms to construct their grassroots stories before the traditional news media paid attention. Some, then, argue that social media serves as an alternative media for citizens to challenge the narrative established by mainstream media. Despite successful cases, alternative news and narratives are not always found. Meanwhile, the accelerated information flow on social media reduces the opportunity for fact-checking, forcing users to embrace information shortcuts for rapid information processing. It increases users' vulnerability to certain communication strategies and further limits access to diverse narratives. This observation raises the question of generalization over the findings.

Based on this ongoing debate, this thesis examines to what extent social media users can construct and challenge the narratives built by the mainstream media on issues of war and foreign policy. This dissertation first investigates elements that determine the content popularity and the preference of content type to analyse the change in communication strategies. Then, semantic networks will be employed to explore the narratives presented by traditional media and other media accounts.

This dissertation finds discrete emotional cues (anger and fear) and sentimental-rich content are more popular, which shows a similar trend with the observation in the mass communication model. Both mainstream media and alternative media accounts present unified narratives with only slight differences in language choice. Those findings further support the claim that the arguments on alternative narratives built on social media face generalization issues. It also adds practical implications by utilizing emotion and other elements as information shortcuts to quickly promote narratives and political ideologies.