Social identity correlates of social media engagement before and after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine

Despite the global presence of social media platforms, the reasons why people like and share content are still poorly understood. We investigate how group identity mentions and expressions of ingroup solidarity and outgroup hostility in posts correlate with engagement on Ukrainian social media (i.e., shares, likes, and other reactions) before and after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. We use a dataset of 1.6 million posts from Ukrainian news source pages on Facebook and Twitter (currently X) and a geolocated sample of 149 thousand Ukrainian tweets. Before the 2022 Russian invasion, we observe that outgroup mentions in posts from news source pages are generally more strongly associated with engagement than negative, positive, and moral-emotional language. After the invasion, social identity mentions become less strongly associated with engagement. Moreover, post-invasion ingroup solidarity posts are strongly related to engagement, whereas posts expressing outgroup hostility show smaller associations. This is the case for both news and non-news social media data. Our correlational results suggest that signaling solidarity with one’s ingroup online is associated with more engagement than negativity about outgroups during intense periods of intergroup conflicts, at least in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war.