There is qualitative evidence of intersection between anti-vaccination, anti-lockdown and pro-Kremlin narrative in European Social Media, but no research quantifies the level of the overlap. Here I show that pro-Kremlin users are over 51 times more likely to be involved in both anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine clusters than anti-Kremlin users.
The
aim of this blog is to evaluate the reaction of Social Media users in
Germany and to correlate pro-Kremlin positions during the Russian
invasion with antivaxx/supporting coronasceptic protest attitudes.
Infodemiology
is
very useful in understanding social dynamics during epidemics acting
a supplementary role to standard tools as surveys (Jarynowski,
Wójta-Kempa, et al. 2020; Eysenbach 2020),
infoveillance
could
be useful for public health decision makers (i.e. in early warning
systems of prevalence estimation (Jarynowski et al. 2022) or burden
of measures (Jarynowski et al. 2021)), but it should also be
remembered that the COVID-19 pandemic is also a potential area of
hybrid activities below the threshold of war. Thus, I deploy a social
network approach to collected tweets related to three polarizing
issues (in German language):
1)
„Impfung” data set consisting of 1 160 941 vaccination
related tweets with 171 542 unique selected users from the first half
of 2021;
2)
the biggest coronasceptic protest in Germany #B2908 with 389 217
tweets and 71 612 selected unique users taking place in Berlin in
August 2020;
3)
War related #IstandwithPutin 3 032 tweets with unique users 2 089 in
first days of Russian invasion on Ukraine in February/March 2022.
Russia-sponsored
traditional and social media have been marked by the European
External Action Service (EU counter disinformation agency) as
propagating dis-/mis-information during Covid-19 pandemic in Germany
(EEAS 2021; EEAS 2020). According to surveys, the highest
coronasceptic protest potential is mainly among far right i.e. AfD
(59%) and to some extent far left i.e. die Linke (18%) part of the
electorate (Lamberty et al. 2022) and similar mosaic can be found on
Twitter (Jarynowski, Semenov, et al. 2020). Thus, both some
fractions of the far right and far left side of the German political
sphere did not support sanctions issued by the
European Parliament on 01.03.2022
against Russia after invasions on Ukraine. Protesters (during the
analyzed peak on 29.08.2020 on the streets of Berlin) were claiming
(among others) that Germany was still an “occupied country” and
demonstrators just wanted to “defend [their] freedom and [their]
democracy” asking „Mr. Putin” for help (Loucaides
2021). Moreover, association between pro-Kremlin narration and
vaccine diplomacy (Wiśniewska 2021) and hesitancy (Broniatowski et
al. 2018) is not a new phenomenon. As COVID-19 vaccines uptake is
promoted in state sponsored media inside Russia, anti-vaccination
attitudes are fuelled to the international audience. AstraZeneca
Covid-19 vaccine was potentially identified as the main target of the
larger Kremlin campaign on Twitter aimed at discrediting the Western
vaccines (Jemielniak & Krempovych 2021). Let’s note that German
society reacted with the highest level of panic among European
countries (i.e. comparing Google Trends search volumes of Thrombosis)
rolling out the same vaccine to a more or less the same extent (Belik
& Jarynowski 2021).
Pro-Russian/pro-Ukrainian
propaganda with #IstandwithPutin in English was an inspiration
for
this analysis.
Classification
of users to classes (pro/anti-Kremlin as well pro/anti-vaccination or
pro/anti-protesters) is a difficult task (most social movements are
accompanied by the opposition and phenomenon of hashtag
hijacking
can be observed) and various techniques for tweets/users
identification were proposed (Helmus et al. 2018; Golovchenko 2020).
Here, simple community detection algorithms (Jarynowski et al. 2019)
were applied based on retweeting activity (Jarynowski & Płatek
2022). To assess overlapping sets, only accounts created before
2020.07.15 (with a history) have been selected to exclude obvious
bots and trolls.
Thus
1890 accounts were classified as anti-Kremlin and 199 as pro-Kremlin,
42 314 users who were classified as protests supporters and 25 803
who were against protests, as well as 72 669 users who were
classified as pro-vaccination and 26 792 anti-vaccination. Keywords
frequencies analysis reveals that main discussion of Pro-Kremlin
users are concentrating on Americans (i.e. building relativism
stating that USA have been invading other countries) or energy (i.e.
Germany needs Russian oil, gas and carbon). Sentiment of Pro-Kremlin
is less positive than Anti-Kremlin, which suggests that Pro-Kremlin
narration is less emotional and more calculated. I found that 66
(33%) of Pro-Kremlin users and only 18 (1%) of Anti-Kremlin users
were involved in both anti-Vaccination AND pro-Protests discourse.
Thus, 51-fold (p-Value<0.001) higher activity of Pro-Kremlin users
in both anti-vaccination and anti-lockdown communities suggest strong
cohesion and mobilisation of these accounts. 62% of pro-Kremlin users
have been engaged in vaccines and 45% in coronasceptic protests
(without distinguising sides). In a minority of Pro-Kremlin accounts,
which have not been engaged in COVID-19 discourse at all, Middle-East
and Serbs minorities or supporters were found.
Based
on the analysis of protest material of the anti-lockdown Berlin
demonstration in 2020 and COVID-19 vaccines, overlaps with accounts
of pro-Kremlin attitudes (using a very specific hashtag
#IstandwithPutin) can be identified, showing that they are
significantly different from anti-Kremlin users. This is only
signalling analysis while there is high uncertainty in user
classification (as there is no perfect method) and further research
is needed for method validation. Thus, pro-Kremlin agenda is
different in each society, as in German speaking population fossils
and liberty are the main frame of concern, in
English speaking world
anti-Western attitudes are highly present when in Polish
Ukrainian
genocide on Polish population during WWII is and anti-refugee
attitude may be amplified. Here I wanted to discuss if parts of the
liberal scripts activated during COVID-19 pandemic in European
societies (i.e. the German speaking population) could be used and
played by foreign intelligence. Especially, as this topic seems to be
under-investigated in Western Europe in comparison to Eastern Europe
or Anglo-American countries. However, Pro-Kremlin users’ motivation
to engage in anti-vaccination/anti-lockdown communities may be either
internal (to promote their own agenda) or external (to spread
pro-Russian propaganda), but it is untraceable by my approach.
References
Belik,
Vitaly & Jarynowski, Andrzej 2021 ‘Elucidating the interplay of
COVID-19 epidemic and social dynamics via Internet media in Germany’
link
Broniatowski,
David A et al. 2018 ‘Weaponized health communication: Twitter bots
and Russian trolls amplify the vaccine debate’ American
journal of public health
108/10:1378–1384
EEAS
2020 ‘Short assessments of narratives and disinformation around the
Covid19 pandemic (UPDATE MAY-NOVEMBER 2020’ link
2021
‘Short assessments of narratives and disinformation around the
Covid-19 pandemic (UPDATE DECEMBER 2020 – APRIL 2021)’ link
Eysenbach,
Gunther 2020 ‘How to fight an infodemic: the four pillars of
infodemic management’ Journal
of medical Internet research
22/6:e21820
Golovchenko,
Yevgeniy 2020 ‘Measuring the scope of pro-Kremlin disinformation on
Twitter’ Humanities
and Social Sciences Communications
7/1:1–11
Helmus,
Todd C et al. 2018 Russian
social media influence: Understanding Russian propaganda in Eastern
Europe
Rand Corporation
Jarynowski,
Andrzej et al. 2021 ‘Mild Adverse Events of Sputnik V Vaccine in
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Journal
of Medical Internet Research
23/11:e30529
2022 ‘Analysis of perception of infectious diseases on the internet in Poland’ SVEPM link
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Andrzej & Płatek, Daniel 2022 ‘Sentiment analysis, topic
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Łódzki, 2022 The
Covid-19 Pandemic as a Challenge for Media and Communication Studies
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Jarynowski,
Andrzej; Semenov, Alexander & Belik, Vitaly 2020 ‘Protest
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Andrzej; Wójta-Kempa, Monika & Belik, Vitaly 2020 ‘Trends in
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Jemielniak,
Dariusz & Krempovych, Yaroslav 2021 ‘An analysis of AstraZeneca
COVID-19 vaccine misinformation and fear mongering on Twitter’
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Lamberty,
Pio; Holnburger, Josef & Tort, Maheba 2022 CeMAS-Studie:
Das Protestpotential während der COVID-19-Pandemie link
Loucaides,
Josef, Darren; Perrone, Alessio; Holnburger 2021 ‘How Germany
became ground zero for the COVID infodemic’ link
Wiśniewska, Iwona 2021 ‘Sputnik over Europe’ OSW Commentary 387
Andrzej
Jarynowski:
computational epidemiologist with media coverage in Bloomberg and
Washington Post among others. PhD candidate with accepted thesis on
infectious disease modelling. An expert in infoveillance and
infodemiology.