As the Ukraine crisis precipitates cyber threats, it will be critical for private and public organizations to monitor the digital public conversation (online conversations held on public forums, social media and other public communications channels) to understand the long-term impacts of the conflict. This requires resilient, proactive, and sophisticated intelligence to identify relevant trends and conversations in a sea of online information.
To understand the narratives and key players driving the digital conversation, Constella’s team created a custom, proprietary dashboard visualizing selected dimensions of the digital public conversation pertaining to the Ukraine crisis. Our dashboard offers a tool identifying fast-moving global trends related to online conversation and the Ukraine crisis.
Constella’s threat intelligence team can extract insights on the engagement and diffusion of a wide range of actors, media domains, platforms, content, and narratives. Sample questions that Constella’s dashboard and insights address include:
- Which themes are shaping the conversation related to Ukraine?
- How are key communities interacting online considering Russia’s invasion?
- Is there activity signaling potential malign distortion of key narratives?
Constella’s dashboard analyzes a specific set of dimensions that govern what data is collected. These variables have been selected due to their relevance within the current geopolitical conversation. However, the data visualized is only a fragment of Constella’s broader data lake. As such, this dashboard can be modified as the conflict unfolds. Over the period analyzed (March 21st to March 28th, 2022), the dashboard captured 21,996,914 results generated by 3,036,185 users interacting in English.
To determine the different communities of users (based on affinity of interaction) and visually represent the resulting network, Constella’s data scientists applied clustering algorithms, like the Louvain Method for community detection, or centrality algorithms like Eigenvector to measure and rank influence across the network for example. Constella’s algorithms identified seven key communities producing conversations related to the conflict.
Each week, Constella Intelligence will share notable findings from its dashboard on the Constella Intelligence blog.