Mapping Twitter Activity in the 2019 Ukrainian Political Landscape

Twitter, which was recently renamed to X, has become a critical asset for political discourse and it is widely believed that it has had a substantial influence on the outcome of elections around the world. In this paper, we analyse Twitter activity during the 2019 Ukrainian elections and show that a strong positive support is not a mandatory condition for a positive outcome, while berating the opponent throughout negative Twitter activity is more significant. In the presidential election, Volodymyr Zelensky was considered as an outsider, but his successful campaign took advantage of the negative discourse against Petro Poroshenko. Our analysis also shows that media outlets played an important role as they have kept the anti-Poroshenko discourse active from March 2019 until August 2019 when parliamentary elections were held in Ukraine.