Social media framing of the 2022 ‘War in Ukraine’: A content analysis study of the Canadian prime minister’s tweets

Abstract

This article scrutinizes the frames that are deployed by the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau about the Russia–Ukraine event and the actors who are involved in this event. Accordingly, the corpus consists of 108 English text-only original tweets retrieved from the Twitter account of Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) between 23 February and 30 April 2022. This timeframe covers the beginning and the early stages of the Russia–Ukraine event that has captured the attention of mainstream and social media. Qualitative content analysis is conducted on the selected tweets, guided by framing theory and critical discourse analysis. The findings reveal that Trudeau utilized different frames to label and portray the current event. He also used ‘authoritarian’ frames to depict Russia and pro-Russia actors as outgroup members, who are directly responsible and should be held accountable for their actions, whereas ‘freedom’ frames are employed to represent Ukraine and pro-Ukraine actors as ingroup members, who have common values with Canada and need all kinds of support and assistance.