Abstract

Russian disinformation is increasingly being addressed in both research and news media. However, there is significantly less investigation into the function and impact of the counter-measures used by US political actors to address this disinformation. On social media, there is a growing trend of American politicians using these virtual platforms as spaces for disseminating information, broadcasting opinions, initiating diplomacy, and–as a whole–exerting some degree of soft power during digitally-influenced conflicts. This project relies on a Python-based program to analyze Tweets from US politicians relating to the current conflict in Ukraine and finds that political social media messaging tends to have a strong positive sentiment, in that it is both biased and opinionated in a positive direction, or–in other words–that it has a positive polarity and subjectivity. The findings will then be extended to social media and political conflict as a whole.