The Resilience of Polish Social Consciousness to Russian Propaganda Disseminated via the Internet in the First Months of the Russia-Ukraine Armed Conflict

Abstract

The article describes the contemporary mechanisms of shaping social awareness in the initial phase of an armed conflict. The analysis has been narrowed down to one of the critical areas of influence on public awareness, i.e., the impact through the mass media - particularly the Internet. As a case study, the activities related to the armed conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine were utilized, and the observed population consisted of Internet users in the Republic of Poland. The results were based on publicly available data from the Google Trends tool. In addition, the keywords entered into this database were predefined with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools embedded in Chat GPT-4 algorithms. The result of this analysis demonstrates the high resilience of the social awareness of Poles to the attempt to change its positive attitude towards humanitarian and military aid for fighting Ukraine in the first days of the Russian invasion in February 2022.