Dynamics of Emotionality during a Full-Scale Russian Invasion in Telegram Channels of Professional and Amateur media

Authors

  • V. Shevchenko Навчально-науковиий інститут журналістики Київського національного університету імені Тараса Шевченка https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1642-1283
  • A. Tulchiy Донецький національний університет імені Василя Стуса https://orcid.org/0009-0004-5247-8564

Keywords:

emotionality, Telegram, Ukraine, news, full-scale war

Abstract

In Ukraine, Telegram channels have become a platform for urgent news and alerts related to shelling, air strikes, government decisions and achievements of the Ukrainian armed forces. The posts of these media regardless of the topic contain one or another emotional reaction (emoji). This study tracked the dynamics of the use of these emotional responses over the two years since the start of Russian full-scale invasion. Telegram channels of various types were taken for analysis: "Hromadske", "Toronto Television" and "Ukraina Seychas". Programs written in Python were used to download, process posts, and search for emoji. This made it possible to detect all the reactions present in the posts. To identify the types of emotions, Emojipedia was used, where reactions with corresponding values were searched for by the keywords "sadness", "joy", etc. It was established that negative emotions (anger and sadness) were more popular for telegram channels of professional mass media. Instead, for the anonymous Telegram channel, positive (love and joy) dominated. In addition, it was determined that some emotions remained stable: pride, joy, gratitude for Hromadske, joy for Toronto Television; pride is for Ukraine Now. We also observed that over time the positive emotion changed to a negative one, which, of course, can be explained by the course of events during the full-scale invasion, sadness, fatigue from the events taking place at the front lines, in the country and in the world. It was also found that the environment of Telegram channels is changing the way in which news was previously created: emotions are becoming an important component of it. And although researchers and practitioners in the field of media have yet to establish to what extent the emotional reactions in the news during a full-scale invasion meet professional standards, it is noted that in general the reactions allow, firstly, to see the difference in the approaches to their expression by professional and amateur media, and secondly, to reproduce certain emotional messages for their audiences.

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Published

2024-12-27

Issue

№ 2 (2024)

Section

ЖУРНАЛІСТИКА ТА СОЦІАЛЬНІ КОМУНІКАЦІЇ

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