European Governments’ Communication about Brexit in Online and Social Media

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Holger Sievert, whose interest is in the European public sphere. There are now some decades of criticism that suggests that the development of that public sphere is lagging behind other forms of European integration, and such criticism has now also increasingly focussed on online and digital media.

This missing European public sphere has also been blamed as one driver of the U.K.’s recent Brexit vote: without a European public sphere there are few fora available to counteract the negative discussion about the European Union that may be taking place in national public spheres, and pro-European communication, not least also from governments, must continue to inject itself into such national public spheres. The present study examined this for three European countries, exploring government communication across government sites and some 20 social media sites.

Content was coded across government site articles, social media activities, and user comments; the project examined governments’ use of social media, their style and tone of communication, their interaction with users, their speed of responses, and their roles in such dialogue. Compared longitudinally across multiple years, this showed that governments have diversified the platforms they use; but that communication styles have not been modernised significantly; that tonally neutral statements are most prominent; that many governments do not show a great deal of interaction with users; that responses when they happen (this was mainly in Germany, in the present study) do also engage with negative comments; that response lengths varied considerably; that responses occurred fairly frequently (43% within 30 minutes, in Germany); and that there is rarely any change of roles. Generally, the style of communication still remains quite formal and distant.

Of the countries investigated, the German federal government has made the most advances towards interaction via social media; for others social media remain mainly a channel for political advertising. This lack of adjustment may well leave social media to be exploited by populist and extremist movements, and may fail to address those citizens who no longer engage with conventional media as a source of information. This is also especially important in creating a more Europeanised public sphere: social media could enable governments to contribute to a more European discussion, rather than focussing only on domestic legacy media.