echen102/ukraine-russia

Ukraine and Russia Conflict Tweet IDs

The repository contains an ongoing collection of tweets IDs associated with the current conflict in Ukraine and Russia, which we commenced collecting on Februrary 22, 2022. We leveraged Twitter's search API to extract historical tweets, leading our dataset to contain tweets from February 17, 2022. These tweets are currently being processed and tweet IDs from February 17 - 22 will be published in our next release. We leveraged Twitter’s streaming API to follow specified accounts and also collect in real-time tweets that mention specific keywords. To comply with Twitter’s Terms of Service, we are only publicly releasing the Tweet IDs of the collected Tweets. The data is released for non-commercial research use.

The associated paper to this repository can be found here: Tweets in Time of Conflict: A Public Dataset Tracking the Twitter Discourse on the War Between Ukraine and Russia

Due to Twitter's changing policies around their free API, we are unsure of how this will impact academic access to the API. We will continue to collect tweets and update this repository for as long as we can.

Data Organization

The Tweet-IDs are organized as follows:

• Tweet-ID files are stored in folders that indicate the year and month of the collection (YEAR-MONTH).
• Individual Tweet-ID files contain a collection of Tweet IDs, and the file names all follow the same structure, with a prefix “ukraine_russia-” followed by the YEAR-MONTH-DATE-HOUR.
• Note that Twitter returns Tweets in UTC, and thus all Tweet ID folders and file names are all in UTC as well.

Notes About the Data

Other Notes

• We will keep a running summary of basic statistics as we upload data in each new release.
• The file keywords.txt and accounts.txt contains the updated keywords and accounts respectively that we tracked in our data collection. Each keyword and account will be followed by the date we began tracking them, and date we removed them (if the keyword or account has been removed) from our tracking list.
• Consider using tools such as the Hydrator and Twarc to rehydrate the Tweet IDs. Instructions for both are in the next section.
• Hydrating may take a while, and Tweets may have been deleted since our initial collection. If that is the case, unfortunately you will not be able to get the deleted Tweets from querying Twitter's API.

How to Hydrate

Hydrating using Hydrator (GUI)

Navigate to the Hydrator github repository and follow the instructions for installation in their README. As there are a lot of separate Tweet ID files in this repository, it might be advisable to first merge files from timeframes of interest into a larger file before hydrating the Tweets through the GUI.

Hydrating using Twarc (CLI)

Many thanks to Ed Summers (edsu) for writing this script that uses Twarc to hydrate all Tweet-IDs stored in their corresponding folders.

First install Twarc and tqdm

pip3 install twarc
pip3 install tqdm

Configure Twarc with your Twitter API tokens (note you must apply for a Twitter developer account first in order to obtain the needed tokens). You can also configure the API tokens in the script, if unable to configure through CLI.

twarc configure

Run the script. The hydrated Tweets will be stored in the same folder as the Tweet-ID file, and is saved as a compressed jsonl file

python3 hydrate.py

Data Usage Agreement / How to Cite

This dataset is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). By using this dataset, you agree to abide by the stipulations in the license, remain in compliance with Twitter’s Terms of Service, and cite the following manuscript:

Emily Chen and Emilio Ferrara. 2022. Tweets in Time of Conflict: A Public Dataset Tracking the Twitter Discourse on the War Between Ukraine and Russia. arXiv:cs.SI/2203.07488

BibTeX:

@misc{chen2022tweets,
      title={Tweets in Time of Conflict: A Public Dataset Tracking the Twitter Discourse on the War Between Ukraine and Russia}, 
      author={Emily Chen and Emilio Ferrara},
      year={2022},
      eprint={2203.07488},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.SI}
}

Statistics Summary (v1.5)

Number of Tweets : 620,510,853

Language breakdown of top 10 most prevalent languages :

Language	ISO	No. tweets	% total Tweets
English	en	440,353,617	70.97%
French	fr	26,249,721	4.23%
Spanish	es	23,284,103	3.75%
German	de	20,754,440	3.34%
Italian	it	15,342,240	2.47%
Russian	ru	13,520,722	2.18%
Undefined	und	12,902,561	2.08%
Japanese	ja	11,419,369	1.84%
Ukrainian	uk	11,163,902	1.8%
Turkish	tr	8,088,613	1.3%

Known Gaps

Date	Time

Inquiries

Please read through the README and the closed issues to see if your question has already been addressed first.

If you have technical questions about the data collection, please contact Emily Chen at echen920[at]usc[dot]edu.

If you have any further questions about this dataset please contact Dr. Emilio Ferrara at emiliofe[at]usc[dot]edu.

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