Tone of Russian online news about global leaders 2023

Online news articles published in Russia had the most negative tone when mentioning the former U.S. President Donald Trump, the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the U.S. President Joseph (Joe) Biden, based on the average sentiment score in 2023. Furthermore, Zelenskyy had the most negative average sentiment score in 2022 in view of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In 2017 and 2018, online articles mentioning Zelenskyy in Russia were mostly positive because he was commonly known as a comedian and actor in the country in these years.

As for the articles mentioning the country's own president, Vladimir Putin, their average sentiment score also decreased in 2022 due to the war in Ukraine, though it was higher than that of several other leaders, such as Xi Jinping and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Moreover, with a score of -1.06 in 2023, online articles mentioning Putin in Russia had a more positive tone than on average around the world, where the score was measured at -2.29.

Average sentiment score of online news articles mentioning selected global political leaders in Russia from 2017 to 2023

Characteristic	Angela Merkel	Boris Johnson	Donald Trump	Joe Biden	Narendra Modi	Olaf Scholz	Recep Tayyip Erdoğan	Rishi Sunak	Ursula von der Leyen	Vladimir Putin	Volodymyr Zelenskyy	Xi Jinping
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-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-

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Release date

March 2024

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Region

Russia

Survey time period

2017 to 2023

Supplementary notes

The following search terms have been used: "Angela Merkel," "Biden," "Boris Johnson," "Donald Trump," "Erdogan," "Narendra Modi," "Olaf Scholz," "Putin," "Rishi Sunak," "von der Leyen," "Xi Jinping" and "Zelensky / Zelenskyy / Selenskyj / Zelenskiy."

The mentions refer to the GDELT database which translates articles in 65 languages into English. The figures represent the average sentiment score of all articles GDELT monitored during that time interval which include at least once the search term. The score is calculated by giving words in an article an sentiment score based on its connotation (from -100 (extremely negative) to +100 (extremely positive) and taking the mean of these words per article. The overall score is the average score of all articles.
The tone is weighted.

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