The first two months in the war in Ukraine through topic modeling and sentiment analysis

Abstract

In recent years, social media remained not only an environment for expression, but it also became an active battlefield where its users emulate their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and experiences about the ongoing conflicts and wars, and where sometimes social manipulation techniques become difficult to identify, tackle, and counter. Currently, proper social media analytics solutions are still incipient regarding the ongoing war in Ukraine, but they are much needed. Consequently, this research aims to extract and analyze the topics discussed and the sentiments experienced by Ukrainian Telegram users on data collected in the first 2 months of war in Ukraine through a design science research in a data science methodological approach carried out in a multidisciplinary stance contributing to the ongoing strategic, socio-ethical, and technical discourses and efforts.