As the Russia-Ukraine War unfolds, social media platforms have become critical battlegrounds for major powers to project geopolitical influence and construct competing realities. While much research focuses on the direct belligerents, less attention has been paid to how influential third-party states—specifically China and the United States—strategically frame the conflict to align with their respective national interests. This study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling with manual framing analysis, to examine 362 Chinese posts from Weibo and 2,513 American tweets from Twitter across three distinct stages of the war. Our analysis reveals a striking asymmetry in discursive strategies. The U.S. media maintained a sustained, high-volume "moral outrage," predominantly utilizing human interest and factual frames to establish forensic authority and mobilize global empathy for Ukraine. In contrast, Chinese media exhibited a pattern of "strategic silence": following an initial burst of coverage, attention dropped precipitously. When coverage did occur, it favored leadership and factual frames to project an image of neutral objectivity, while simultaneously employing specific thematic narratives to subtly attribute blame to U.S. hegemony rather than Russian aggression. These findings suggest that news framing on social media serves as a sophisticated instrument of statecraft. For the U.S., framing is a tool for consensus mobilization; for China, it acts as a mechanism for strategic hedging—maintaining a "pro-Russia neutrality" by selectively amplifying anti-Western sentiment while minimizing direct engagement with the war's brutalities.

Huinu Qi, Yaohui Cai. Strategic Silence vs. Moral Outrage: A Comparative Framing Analysis of the Russia-Ukraine War on Weibo and Twitter. Academic Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences (2026), Vol. 9, Issue 3: 1-7. https://doi.org/10.25236/AJHSS.2026.090301.

[1] Bateson G. A theory of play and fantasy[M]. Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology, 1972: 131-144.

[2] Goffman E. Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience[M]. Harvard University Press, 1974. 

[3] Entman R M. Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm[J]. Journal of Communication, 1993, 43(4): 51-58. 

[4] De Vreese C H, Peter J, Semetko H A. Framing politics at the launch of the Euro: A cross-national comparative study of frames in the news[J]. Political Communication, 2001, 18(2): 107-122. 

[5] Scheufele D A. Framing as a theory of media effects[J]. Journal of Communication, 1999, 49(1): 103-122. 

[6] Scheufele D A, Iyengar S. The state of framing research: A call for new directions[M]. The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication, 2012. 

[7] Peng Z. Framing the anti-war protests in the global village: A comparative study of newspaper coverage in three countries[J]. International Communication Gazette, 2008, 70(5): 361-377. 

[8] Topoushian M. Interpreting the constructed realities of the 1991 Gulf War: A comparative textual analysis of the two Arab and two North American newspapers[D]. Concordia University, 2002. 

[9] Dimitrova D V, Strömbäck J. Mission accomplished? Framing of the Iraq War in the elite newspapers in Sweden and the United States[J]. Gazette, 2005, 67(5): 399-417.

[10] Luther C A, Zhou X. Within the boundaries of politics: News framing of SARS in China and the United States[J]. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 2005, 82(4): 857-872. 

[11] Zillmann D, Chen L, Knobloch S, Callison C. Effects of lead framing on selective exposure to internet news reports[J]. Communication Research, 2004, 31(1): 58-81.

[12] Dimitrova D V, Connolly-Ahern C. A tale of two wars: Framing analysis of online news sites in coalition countries and the Arab world during the Iraq War[J]. Howard Journal of Communications, 2007, 18(2): 153-168.

[13] Liu Z. News framing of the 2014–15 Ukraine conflict by the BBC and RT[J]. International Communication Gazette, 2024, 86(4): 277-306.

[14] Goldstein A. US–China rivalry in the twenty-first century: Déjà vu and Cold War II[J]. China International Strategy Review, 2020, 2(1): 48-62.

[15] Lu X. From “ideological enemies” to “strategic partners”: A rhetorical analysis of US-China relations in intercultural contexts[J]. Howard Journal of Communications, 2011, 22(4): 336-357.

[16] Huang J, Cook G G, Xie Y. Large-scale quantitative evidence of media impact on public opinion toward China[J]. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2021, 8(1): 1-8.