By Max Hänska and Stefan Bauchowitz
To what extent does twitter provide a platform for the emergence of a European public sphere? Around 47% of Europeans use social media at least once a week, making it a potentially important source of information and a promising platform for debate. Indeed, it has sometimes been suggested that the interactive affordance of social media may provide the ideal platform for a more participatory public, and for a transnational one structurally less confined to the borders of nation states.
By tracing the visibility of EU (and Eurozone) issues, or issues relating to European countries in national twitterspheres we can gain an impression of how twitter is Europeanized: the volume of tweets using specific keywords allows researchers to detect whether national twitterspheres synchronise around specific issues or events, while the multi-directional interactive nature of twitter allows us to observe cross-border interactions between users, both of which can be understood as indicators of Europeanization.
We report on results from our study which maps the European twittersphere by tracking twitter activity during key European events. Part of our study focuses on the recent negotiations leading up to the third Greek bailout agreement. The stage for these negotiations was set by months of acrimony between the newly elected Greek government and its creditors. An agreement between the Greek government and its creditors was finally brokered at a European Council summit, which was tensely anticipated because a Greek exit from the Euro, or even the EU, no longer seemed improbable, but a real possibility.
Among other questions, we were interested in how tweets were distributed across countries (degrees of Europeanisation), and the amount of boarder-crossing interactions between users in the European twittersphere. Through the twitter streaming API we downloaded tweets matching a set of keywords relevant to Eurogroup and European Council meetings between 12th and 13th of July. We used the Google Maps Geocoding API to convert the user-specified location data to geographic coordinates.
Peaks and troughs in the volume of activity in the European twittersphere are clearly related to events in Brussels. For instance the European twittersphere responded across the board when European Council President Donald Tusk tweeted at 8:55 on Monday, 13 July that:
EuroSummit has unanimously reached agreement. All ready to go for ESM programme for #Greece with serious reforms & financial support
Following Tusk’s tweet, activity is at its highest – between 9am and 10am alone we collected 15,376 tweets from users located within the EU28. Tweet volumes by country are plotted in Figure 1. While the second peak clearly relates to the conclusion of the summit, the first relates to the emergence of the #thisisacoup hashtag the previous night.
