Exposure and Adoption of Social Dimensions During the Ukraine War

his paper investigates exposure and adoption of
social media users to ten social dimensions during the initial
phase of the Ukrainian war. To this end, we analyze a dataset
including over 189 million Twitter messages. In order to explore
how different social dimensions are adopted and propagated, we
derived a communication network from our Twitter dataset and
applied a probabilistic approach to model the spread of messages.
Our results indicate that messages containing knowledge – in
particular those that provide informative and factual content –
emerge as key drivers of engagement on Twitter, highlighting
the critical role of an informed discourse in shaping the public
opinion and social behavior during the conflict. Moreover, our
findings suggest that social dimensions do not significantly
influence early adoption behaviors, indicating that the timing
and context of exposure may play a more crucial role in how
users engage with content on the platform.