Invasion@Ukraine: Providing and describing a Twitter streaming dataset that captures the outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine in 2022

Pohl, Janina Susanne; Markmann, Simon; Assenmacher, Dennis; Grimme, Christian

Abstract

Social media can be a mirror of human interaction, society, and historic disruptions. Their reach enables the global dissemination of information in the shortest possible time and, thus, the individual participation of people worldwide in global events in almost real-time. However, these platforms can be equally efficiently used in information warfare to manipulate human perception and opinion formation. 

Within this paper, we describe a dataset of raw tweets collected via the Twitter Streaming API in the context of the onset of the war, which Russia started in Ukraine on February 24, 2022. A distinctive feature of the dataset is that it covers the period from one week before to one week after Russia invades Ukraine. This paper details the acquisition process and provides first insights into the content of the data stream. In addition, the data has been annotated with availability tags, resulting from rehydration attempts at two points in time: directly after data acquisition and shortly before manuscript submission. This may provide information on Twitter moderation policies. On the content level, we can show that this dataset comprises campaigning and spamming activities as well as conspiracy narratives –- topics that certainly deserve more profound investigation. Therefore, the presented dataset is also made available to the community in an extended version with pseudonymized tweet content upon request.

Keywords
Twitter; Dataset; Ukraine; War