ANALYSIS OF THE ONLINE COMMUNICATION STRATEGY OF WORLD POLITICAL LEADERS DURING THE WAR IN UKRAINE (FEBRUARY 24, 2022- JANUARY 23, 2023)

This paper studies the online communication strategies of world leaders during the war in Ukraine from February 24, 2022, to January 23, 2023. The research methods involved collecting Twitter data from four leaders using the rtweet package and analyzing it in RStudio. The analysis focused on sentiment indicators using AFINN and NRC methods through syuzhet and SentimentAnalysis packages. The NRC Emotion Lexicon associated words with emotions and sentiments, while the AFINN lexicon rated words for valence. SentimentAnalysis used dictionaries like QDAP, Harvard IV, and Loughran-McDonald. To visualize the data, a word frequency matrix was created using the tm package and projected as a word cloud with the wordcloud package after cleaning the text. The findings indicate that most world leaders communicate via Twitter, and their tweets are mainly positive in tone. The most active communication strategies involve using hashtags related to the issues of the war, retweeting messages from other leaders, and issuing statements about the conflict. The results suggest that the participating leaders position themselves as the voice of the nation and emphasize the importance of international solidarity in achieving peace. Furthermore, the study reveals that the leaders are highly engaged in bidirectional communication, with most messages focused on people's safety and the need for a diplomatic solution. The findings of this study could help policymakers understand how online communication plays a role in international conflict resolution as well as how world leaders can effectively use online communication to engage with their public.