Study title

Tweetplomacy 23 is a semantically annotated corpus of tweets capturing digital communicative interaction between international political leaders, peer groups and citizens in the wake of three major global crises: (1) the increasing emphasis on the security of energy supplies following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; (2) the political and geo-economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic; (3) the intensified debate on the progression of climate change. These events occurred between 2018 and 2023, each of them marking a significant shake-up of the international system. The dataset focuses on the strategic use of networked information on X (formerly Twitter) by executive political actors facing exogenous shocks in the context of a global crisis situation. It is extracted from an X archive covering more than 14 billion tweets collected from the 1% random sample API. To extract the dataset, we resort to a list of top executives of the political administration – heads of state, heads of government, ministers of foreign affairs – or their respective public-relations offices. Their tweets are filtered using a list of thematically relevant keywords in four languages (English, German, French, Spanish), reflecting the discourse with respect to the three crises mentioned above. Our sample covers instances from the beginning of 2018 up to May 2023, representing statements made by leading politicians from 83 countries on all continents. As a subset, tweets published by the political leaders of the 38 member states of the OECD and the five BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) have been extracted. Additionally, the sample comprises a selection of 10 international organizations. The entire data collection consists of the following files: (1) users: excel file with a list of 654 Twitter user handles(usernames) of top executives of the political administration (and/or their institutional accounts), their nationalities, functions/roles and tenure; (2)...