Patterns of Discussion on Twitter around the German NSA Surveillance Scandal

Next up at ECREA 2014 is Sanja Kapidzic, whose interest is in how the NSA scandal was communicated in Germany via Twitter. The public sphere is seen here as having a triadic structure, between journalists, official spokespeople, and citizens. Traditionally, this has been dominated by the mass media, but shifts toward online communication have changed this balance; direct bidirectional communication is now possible between all three points of the triad.

This is especially notable in social media environments such as Twitter; however, new hierarchies and elites may also emerge here. What are the new structures of influence in this context, then?

The research focusses on the discussion of NSA surveillance practices in Germany, targetting everyday citizens as well as government representatives. The focus here was particularly on discussions around the then minister of the interior, Friedrich, and tweets mentioning his name were collected.

Citizens and spokespeople predominantly engaged in retweeting messages; spokespeople and media accounts posted proportionally more links than citizens. Citizens retweeted other citizens more often; spokespeople were equally likely to retweet all three groups; media accounts did not retweet very often, but mostly retweeted citizens. @mentions were not very prominent, but were mostly directed at media accounts. Overwhelmingly, links were directed at media sites.

There wasn't substantial interaction between spokespeople and citizens, then. Media accounts did not pick up much on citizens' statements or pass them on; their own tweets are widely retweeted, though.