Identifying a Transnational European Public Sphere on Twitter

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Javier Ruiz Soler, whose interest is in locating a transnational public sphere on Twitter, in the context of the EU. Many scholars are sceptical of the idea of a European public sphere, due to language and national differences, while others point to the emergence of a growing overlap between national communities and discussions.

Javier addressed these questions by studying hashtags such as #Schengen and #TTIP, as genuine pan-European issues that invite high levels of contestation. Transnationality in such data should be detected especially in countries that have high levels of support for the EU, and will mostly be facilitated by English-language tweets. To examine this, Javier assessed the location of users by a combination of latitude and longitude data, free-text location data, and user profile timezone data to geolocate participating users to their likely countries of origin, which found some 40% of all participants to be located within the European Union.

Some 60% of all interactions in the datasets remain national – between accounts in the same country. This is true especially for the langer nations, where more domestic interlocutors are available to participants; overall, Schengen discussions were more strongly transnational (E-I Index 0.27 on a scale from -1 to +1) while TTIP discussions were more strongly domestic (-0.33). This clearly shows, in the first place, that a transnational public sphere, or at least a transnational public arena does exist on Twitter in Europe.

The most active countries here were not necessarily those with the greatest support for the EU, and English did not dominate the discussions overall: a plurality but not a majority of tweets used English. Around 60% percent of tweets were retweets, and this shows the transfer of information across national boundaries. It will still be necessary to explore exactly how these users are talking about these topics, however.