# Russian propaganda on social media during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.04154 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04154/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 8 Nov 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [PropaInsight: Toward Deeper Understanding of Propaganda in Terms of Techniques, Appeals, and Intent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18997/) (2024)
- [Check News in One Click: NLP-Empowered Pro-Kremlin Propaganda Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15717/) (2024)
- [HQP: A Human-Annotated Dataset for Detecting Online Propaganda](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14931/) (2023)
- [LLM Detectors Still Fall Short of Real World: Case of LLM-Generated Short News-Like Posts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03291/) (2024)
- [Which linguistic cues make people fall for fake news? A comparison of cognitive and affective processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03751/) (2023)
- [Fear and Loathing on the Frontline: Decoding the Language of Othering by Russia-Ukraine War Bloggers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13064/) (2024)
- [Uncovering Differences in Persuasive Language in Russian versus English Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19148/) (2024)
- [Analyzing the Strategy of Propaganda using Inverse Reinforcement Learning: Evidence from the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12788/) (2023)
- [Unveiling Global Narratives: A Multilingual Twitter Dataset of News Media on the Russo-Ukrainian Conflict](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12886/) (2023)
- [Designing Effective Digital Literacy Interventions for Boosting Deepfake Discernment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23492/) (2025)
- [OSINT or BULLSHINT? Exploring Open-Source Intelligence tweets about the Russo-Ukrainian War](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03599/) (2025)
- [Analyzing User Characteristics of Hate Speech Spreaders on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15772/) (2023)
- [SWARM: A Multilingual Human-Annotated Dataset for Russian Propaganda Detection in Search Engine Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12653/) (2026)
- [A Multi-Stage Agentic Framework for Effective Counter-Narrative Generation and Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14178/) (2026)
- [Geopolitical Divisions Across Languages in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20005/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was accompanied by practices of information warfare, yet existing evidence is largely anecdotal while large-scale empirical evidence is lacking. Here, we analyze the spread of pro-Russian support on social media. For this, we collected N = 349,455 messages from Twitter with pro-Russian support. Our findings suggest that pro-Russian messages received ~251,000 retweets and thereby reached around 14.4 million users. We further provide evidence that bots played a disproportionate role in the dissemination of pro-Russian messages and amplified its proliferation in early-stage diffusion. Countries that abstained from voting on the United Nations Resolution ES-11/1 such as India, South Africa, and Pakistan showed pronounced activity of bots. Overall, 20.28% of the spreaders are classified as bots, most of which were created at the beginning of the invasion. Together, our findings suggest the presence of a large-scale Russian propaganda campaign on social media and highlight the new threats to society that originate from it. Our results also suggest that curbing bots may be an effective strategy to mitigate such campaigns.