One of the first major studies of social media behavior during wartime has found that posts celebrating national and cultural unity in a country under attack receive significantly more online engagement than derogatory posts about the aggressors.

From the [article](https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/ukraine-social-media): University of Cambridge psychologists analysed a total of 1.6 million posts on Facebook and Twitter (now X) from Ukrainian news outlets in the seven months prior to February 2022, when Russian forces invaded, and the six months that followed.

Once the attempted invasion had begun, posts classified as expressing Ukrainian “ingroup solidarity” were associated with 92% more engagement on Facebook, and 68% more on Twitter, than similar posts had achieved prior to Russia’s full-scale attack.

While posts expressing “outgroup hostility” towards Russia only received an extra 1% engagement on Facebook after the invasion, with no significant difference on Twitter.

“Pro-Ukrainian sentiment, phrases such as Glory to Ukraine and posts about Ukrainian military heroism, gained huge amounts of likes and shares, yet hostile posts aimed at Russia barely registered,” said Yara Kyrychenko, from Cambridge’s Social Decision-Making Lab (SDML) in its Department of Psychology.

“The vast majority of research on social media uses US data, where divisive posts often go viral, prompting some scholars to suggest that these platforms drive polarisation. In Ukraine, a country under siege, we find the reverse,” said Kyrychenko, lead author of the study published today in Nature Communications.