A common argument against social media is that it helps to foster echo chambers that trap us in our mode of thinking.  New research from the University of California San Diego reminds us that it can also provide valuable insights into the political disposition of a community, with sometimes dire consequences.

The study suggests that Twitter was providing valuable information to the Russian military during their invasion of Ukraine as they sought to annex Crimea.  The study examined Twitter data during the conflict in 2014, and found that the Russian narrative of a fascist coup in Ukraine didn’t catch on in most of Ukraine, but did appear to stick in Crimea, which the researchers believe partly explains why Russian forces didn’t advance further than Crimea.

“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,” the researchers say. “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.”

Valuable insights

While the authors are keen to point out that they don’t have evidence that Russian authorities were using Twitter sentiment analysis in their military planning, they nonetheless believe their findings showcase the potential for such intelligence gathering.

They highlight that the areas they suggest would have been safest to invade based upon the social chatter were in fact the areas the Russian forces were sent to.  The data was collected from August 2013, with GPS coordinates captured for each tweet to geolocate them.  They filtered tweets so they only examined those from Russian speakers based in Ukraine.

They then developed a couple of dictionaries to identify keywords associated with the two competing narratives in the media at that 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,” the researchers explain. “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 researchers believe that the Kremlin would have been keen to understand the social attitudes of Ukrainians, and while social media is not the only way for them to do this, it certainly offers one of the quickest and most effective means of doing so.

While it’s not clear if social media-based intelligence gathering is particularly common in diplomatic or military circles today, it’s an area that the researchers believe is a logical one to expand, and they cite the potential for Chinese officials to gather real-time insights into Taiwanese public opinion as an example.

“We favor the analogy between information warfare techniques and airplanes at the start of the First World War,” the researchers conclude.  “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.”