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.