More than 1.2 million tweets offered researchers A. Burcu Bayram and Vivian P. Ta-Johnson a record of how people around the world responded online to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine—and how that response changed during the war’s first 10 months.
The political scientist and psychologist at UT San Antonio wanted to understand what happens to international solidarity when a conflict continues for months. The project began with questions raised by students in Bayram’s courses on international law and human security: Does intense attention simply fade? When do people turn to other news, crises or everyday distractions? Their study, published in Political Psychology, suggests that the answer is more complicated than a simple loss of interest.
Bayram and Ta-Johnson examined English-language tweets using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, a tool that measures patterns in language. Rather than counting attention alone, they looked at several parts of online expression: active and passive engagement, emotion, concerns about existence and mortality, ways of thinking, and psychological distance from the war.
In the early months, tweets showed intense engagement. People expressed strong negative emotions and wrote about death, conflict and moral questions. Their posts also showed considerable effort to understand events as they unfolded. This early wave of discussion reflected not only attention to the war, but also an attempt to make sense of a crisis with far-reaching consequences.
Over time, several measures fell. Posts grew shorter, retweeting declined, and emotional and cognitive language became less complex. Those changes could look like the public was simply checking out. But another finding complicates that interpretation: psychological distance decreased. As the war became part of the ongoing digital landscape, people increasingly spoke about it in more personal terms.
The researchers describe this as a changing psychological trajectory, not a straight line from solidarity to indifference. Online involvement may become quieter and less elaborate while also feeling more grounded and personally meaningful. A drop in visible activity, then, does not necessarily mean that people no longer care.
That distinction matters for anyone trying to understand how public support develops during a long crisis. If communication and policy efforts treat fewer posts or retweets as proof that solidarity has vanished, they may miss changes in how people relate to events. The study argues for approaches that recognize that engagement can shift in form as a crisis continues.
The research does not claim that every person’s response followed the same path; it analyzes patterns across a large collection of tweets. Still, its findings offer a useful way to read the changing public conversation around Ukraine and other prolonged crises. Instead of asking only whether attention is rising or falling, the study points to a deeper question: how are people expressing concern now?