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Activist translators as citizen journalists on social media

ORCiD logo with link | University of Eastern Finland
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Eastern Finland.

Published online: 2 February 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.25046.hav
Abstract
This article focuses on social media accounts operating on Twitter (currently X) and YouTube. The accounts disseminated information about the war in Ukraine by translating diverse media content, including videos, phone calls, and TV programs primarily from Russian into English and sharing their translations on social media platforms. The account holders are examined both as activist translators and citizen journalists. The data for analysis is drawn from translation-based tweets posted on two widely followed Twitter/X accounts over ten days during a two-month period in 2023. The analysis considers the content, form, and view count of the tweets and the videos linked to them. Findings show that the translations achieved a broad reach and responded to a demand for information on writings and speeches that would otherwise be inaccessible to people without source language skills. Through translation, the accounts contributed to shaping the perceptions and collective memory of the war.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.New gatekeepers of information
    • 2.1Non-institutional gatekeepers of information flows
    • 2.2Varieties of activist translation
  • 3.Data and methods
  • 4.Analysis
  • 5.Further discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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