Detecting Human Rights Violations on Social Media during Russia-Ukraine
  War
Poli Nemkova Solomon Ubani Suleyman Olcay Polat Nayeon Kim Rodney D. Nielsen
The present-day Russia-Ukraine military conflict has exposed the pivotal role
of social media in enabling the transparent and unbridled sharing of
information directly from the frontlines. In conflict zones where freedom of
expression is constrained and information warfare is pervasive, social media
has emerged as an indispensable lifeline. Anonymous social media platforms, as
publicly available sources for disseminating war-related information, have the
potential to serve as effective instruments for monitoring and documenting
Human Rights Violations (HRV). Our research focuses on the analysis of data
from Telegram, the leading social media platform for reading independent news
in post-Soviet regions. We gathered a dataset of posts sampled from 95 public
Telegram channels that cover politics and war news, which we have utilized to
identify potential occurrences of HRV. Employing a mBERT-based text classifier,
we have conducted an analysis to detect any mentions of HRV in the Telegram
data. Our final approach yielded an $F_2$ score of 0.71 for HRV detection,
representing an improvement of 0.38 over the multilingual BERT base model. We
release two datasets that contains Telegram posts: (1) large corpus with over
2.3 millions posts and (2) annotated at the sentence-level dataset to indicate
HRVs. The Telegram posts are in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war. We posit
that our findings hold significant implications for NGOs, governments, and
researchers by providing a means to detect and document possible human rights
violations.