Analyzing Polish Public Opinion on Ukraine and the Russian Invasion Through social media in the Era of Polycrisis

Abstrakt

This study examines the evolving sentiment of Polish social media users toward Ukraine and the Russian invasion thereon, focusing on posts shared on Platform X over time. The research aims to assess how public attitudes have shifted since the outbreak of the war, particularly in the context of polycrisis – a convergence of global crises influencing public opinion and political discourse. By collecting data using targeted hashtags relevant to Ukraine and the war itself, the analysis captures trends in sentiment. Utilizing the combination of natural language processing techniques with machine translation to standardize content across languages, followed by sentiment analysis using Python’s library TextBlob, the research allows for an exploration of emotional tones associated with the conflict. The results gained from the sentiment analysis aim to reveal whether Polish public sentiment has remained consistently supportive of Ukraine or if shifting geopolitical, economic, and social pressures, characteristic of the polycrisis framework, might have led to changes in opinion.