Twitter & warHow Russia May have Used Twitter to Seize Crimea

Online discourse by users of social media can provide important clues about the political dispositions of communities. New research suggests it can even be used by governments as a source of military intelligence to estimate prospective casualties and costs incurred from occupying foreign territories.

In a new University of California San Diego study, researchers examine data from Twitter during the 2014 conflict between Russia and Ukraine. UCSD notes that the Russian television narrative, which is that a fascist coup had taken place, did not “catch on” in Ukrainian Russian-speaking communities. The only exception was Crimea. This could explain why Russia’s forces did not advance further than Crimea’s borders, as Russian analysts may have observed overt signals, including some from social media, that they would have faced strong and violent resistance.

“If you’re a conservative Russian military planner, you only send special forces to places where you are fairly certain they will be perceived as liberators, not occupiers,” said they study’s first author Jesse Driscoll, associate professor of political science at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy. “A violent occupation of Russian-speaking communities that didn’t want the Russian soldiers to be there would have been a public relations disaster for Putin, so estimating occupation costs prospectively would have been a priority.”

The study, published in Post-Soviet Affairs, does not present evidence that Russian analysts used Twitter data – only evidence consistent with its potential to be repurposed using the methods in the paper. Through reconstructing how the Russian-state narrative was received by Russian-speakers living in Ukraine, the researchers were able to determine the areas where it would have been safest for Russia to send special forces. This bore an eerie resemblance to the map of where Russian soldiers actually went – Crimea and a few probes in the far East, but no further.

How Twitter Could Have Been Used by the Kremlin to Determine Whether Russian Soldiers Would Be Welcomed as Liberators or InvadersIn the study, the data from Twitter was collected in real time beginning in August 2013. The researchers compiled tweets with GPS coordinates of social media users who had their locations services turned on. Though data was collected from all over the world (roughly 940,000,000 tweets), the researchers filtered the data by time (the 188 days from February to August 2014), location (Ukraine) and language (Russian).

“We were most interested in Russian-speakers in Ukraine because that is