Narratives of War: Ukrainian Memetic Warfare on Twitter
| Author | Yelena Mejova, Arthur Capozzi, Corrado Monti, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales |
|---|---|
| Published | September 2023 |
| Format | Research paper |
| Original | Read the original |
TL;DR — A study of memes posted by official Ukrainian accounts and meme pages after Russia’s 2022 invasion, finding that ‘victim’ narratives drew about twice the retweets.
By researchers at the ISI Foundation, ETH Zürich and CENTAI; first posted to arXiv in September 2023 (this is v3, January 2025) and published in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW, April 2025). The paper studies wartime memes from independent accounts such as @uamemesforces and, for what the authors call the first time in a full-scale interstate war, from official government accounts such as @Ukraine and @DefenceU.
The authors classify tweets by narrative — hero, victim, villain — and find narratives are key to reach: victim narratives get about twice the retweets, while narratives about the enemy resonate more than heroism or victimhood in countries that give Ukraine more assistance.
What it is: a peer-reviewed computational social science paper.
Where this came from
- A copy saved in October 2026.
- Original source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.08363
- Archived copy (Google Drive): Google Drive
28 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.