The Role of Reddit Social Media Platform in the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict

Abstract

The publication presents the role of social media in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. It presents how social media is mainly used. What is the main reason of social media usage, how the users and other content creators use the available information from social media for war information sharing (Liveuamap). In this research the Reddit social media platform received the focus as the object of the study due to its open content sharing. In my publication, I examined the most popular thirty posts from selected subreddits between 01/01/2022 and 01/11/2022 to see how these posts relate to the conflict in terms of context: how well is the conflict represented, and what is the nature of the content shared? It is important to see the ratio of official information to unofficial information within social media. From the posts examined, it was found that the role of informal information is much more important than the official information. Furthermore, users express a large amount of sympathy in their posts, especially towards the Ukrainian party. The Ukrainian side strongly dominates in terms of affiliation of posts, with only one post among the content analysed representing a Russian side. Garcia and Cunanan-Yabut’s study looked at the Twitter sentiment, and their user reactions yielded similar results.