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Russia’s disinformation war : An analysis of Ukraine themed Russian disinformation campaigns during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022

Weigand, Philipp (2024) Russia’s disinformation war : An analysis of Ukraine themed Russian disinformation campaigns during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

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Abstract:Russian disinformation campaigns are a threat to democratic societies. They undermine the credibility of foreign institutions, shift the perception of truth and create confusion among the societies of Russia’s declared adversaries. This thesis analyzes Russian disinformation before and after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, as the Russo-Ukraine conflict escalated from a Hybrid to a conventional war. For this, a quantitative corpus-based analysis was conducted to compare disinformation regarding changes in quantity, topics and sentiment before and after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The analyzed disinformation was thereby retrieved from the EU Commission’s EUvsDisinfo-database. The analysis was able to detect changes in the quantity and topics of the Ukraine themed disinformation, while the tested sentiment of the Russian disinformation stayed equally negative over the course of the inspected timeframe. The detected changes proved a shift of the Russian disinformation away from multiple topics, focusing on Ukraine-conflict related topics. Yet, these changes have been expected, as a review of previous Russian disinformation campaigns suggested that the central focus of Russian disinformation campaigns have aligned with Russian foreign policy interests before.
Item Type:Essay (Master)
Faculty:BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences
Subject:70 social sciences in general, 88 social and public administration, 89 political science
Programme:European Studies MSc (69303)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/101286
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