A multilingual analysis of pro Russian misinformation on Twitter during the Russian invasion of Ukraine

Abstract The Russian government has long since engaged in an information campaign of propaganda and disinformation as a major part of foreign policy. This has been taken to new heights since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In this study, we investigate pro-Russian misinformation within the opening weeks of the invasion in 6 languages: English, Japanese, Spanish, French, German, and Korean. Using Twitter data, we apply a combination of network and language embedding models to identify popular topics of misinformation amongst users in each language. Despite English users forming the most dominant language base on Twitter, we find that the popularity of misinformation in Japanese regularly outstrips English for certain topics. Misinformation shared by Spanish users is also over-represented in proportion to its much smaller user base. Our results provide insight into the current state of misinformation in each language. While we discuss some of the possible drivers behind the factors such as language over-representation, our study also highlights the need for further cross-lingual misinformation research in order to better understand this phenomena in a truly global context.