Twitter: Is It Representative of Public Sphere or Public Opinion?

The second speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Judith Möller, who shifts our attention to the Habermasian concept of the public sphere, or Öffentlichkeit. In its original conception, this appears only in enlightened discussion – for instance in the coffeehouses of the 19th century –, and it is highly disputable whether this translates to an online and social media environment.

For instance, does Twitter provide the basis for a public sphere? It is public, interactive, and dynamic, and therefore exhibits some of the basic features of a public sphere; journalists frequently regard it as a representation of the broader public sphere, too. But then the Twitter public is hardly representative of the wider population. Given these observations, though, do the discussions that take place resemble broader public opinion, independent of the representativeness of the people who participate in such discussions?

The present project studied this by comparing survey data on public opinion with Twitter data on related discussions in the context of a Dutch referendum on a free trade agreement with Ukraine; first, it compared the number of voices for and against the referendum in both datasets, and these were broadly similar. The arguments used to justify such choices varied substantially between the two datasets, however; on Twitter, the survey was positioned as a way to send a message to the Dutch government, while in the survey the impact on the economy was seen as more important.

Amongst the most influential accounts in the Twitter debate there were a range of politicians from both sides of the argument, as well as some non-Dutch accounts. The Twittersphere thus turns out to be mostly representative, but remains strongly driven by elites; this may not apply in circumstances outside of the short-term, highly focussed discussion about the Ukraine referendum, however. The question remains whether the present project compares the public sphere discussion on Twitter with an indicator of public opinion as assessed by the survey.