How Russia May have Used Twitter to Seize Crimea

the population which might have considered sedition,” said Driscoll.

 The researchers then created two dictionaries to identify key words associated with the two polarized and competing narratives of the news cycles at the time.

“All of this started with an event that the Kremlin still calls a ‘coup’ and Western governments call ‘The Revolution of Dignity’ – very different narratives there,” Driscoll said. “The framing language of ‘terrorism,’ was prominent in anti-Kremlin users and ‘fascism’ was popular among pro-Kremlin tweets. These two narratives were frequently employed in news coverage during the six months in the study, including on Russian and Western television news programs.”

The authors used the twitter data to measure narrative uptake as a window into which storyline was favored in Russian-speaking communities. After manually screening for automated accounts (“bots”), this process yielded 5,328 tweets from 1,339 accounts, which were interpreted by a team of Russian-speakers in Ukraine who read each tweet to identify their political affiliation.  Machine-learning algorithms were then used to create a much larger sample for analysis. With further filtering, the team identified 58,689 tweets as pro-Kremlin and 107,041 as anti-Kremlin. The researchers then mapped out the data over each Ukrainian state, or oblast, comparing the percentage of tweets in each of the two narrative categories.

A New Source of Intelligence to Gauge the Potential Support for Foreign Military Intervention
Though there was some pro-Kremlin sentiment expressed on Twitter in every oblast, the spatial visualization of the data showed Crimea as an outlier based on its high pro-Kremlin percentage. 

“If Russian strategists were likely considering expansion beyond Crimea, they would have been able to use social media information to assess, with a great deal of precision and in real time, the reception that they would likely receive,” Driscoll and his co-author wrote. “Our data shows that further expansion beyond Crimea could have resulted in an ethnic bloodbath.”

Though other studies have focused on how polarized media “bubbles” allow conflicting coverage of the same events, the departure in the Post-Soviet Affairs paper is its emphasis on the potential for social media data to be repurposed for crisis decision-making.

“Our conjecture is that these planners would have been eager for information on social attitudes of Ukrainians,” said Driscoll “Our claim is not that social media is the only way to get this information – the Kremlin has lots of eyes on the ground there – but it does provide a granular picture that analysts from different countries can observe in real time, even from a great distance.”

It is easy to imagine military crisis-bargaining applications of these methods. Mainland Chinese analysts may be hungry for real-time updates on Taiwanese public opinion. U.S. analysts may be interested in the opinions of youth groups in Iran. Social media is a new frontier in this space.

Driscoll and his co-author concluded, “We favor the analogy between information warfare techniques and airplanes at the start of the First World War. Conventional militaries are just beginning to explore the ways that emergent information technologies can shape battlefields. As techniques for real-time data mining become commodified, they will be integrated into best practices for counterinsurgency and, more generally, into military planning. This paper has shown one way in which they could have been useful.”