Can social media facilitate a European public sphere? Transnational communication and the Europeanization of Twitter during the Eurozone crisis

Hänska, Max ORCID: 0000-0001-9188-534X and Bauchowitz, Stefan (2019) Can social media facilitate a European public sphere? Transnational communication and the Europeanization of Twitter during the Eurozone crisis. Social Media + Society, 5 (3). ISSN 2056-3051

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Abstract

Asking whether social media can plausibly facilitate a European public sphere, this article provides the first operationalization and empirical examination of Europeanization of social media communications. It maps the geospatial structure of Twitter activity around Greece’s 2015 bailout negotiations. We find that Twitter activity showed clear signs of Europeanization. Twitter users across Europe tweeted about the bailout negotiations and coalesced around shared grievances. Furthermore, Twitter activity was remarkably transnational in orientation, as users interacted more often with users in other European Union (EU) countries than with domestic ones. As such, social media allowed users to communicate with one another unencumbered by national boundaries, to bring into existence an ad hoc, issue-based European public sphere.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://journals.sagepub.com/home/sms
Additional Information:	© 2019 The Authors
Divisions:	Media and Communications
Subjects:	J Political Science > JN Political institutions (Europe)
Date Deposited:	26 Apr 2019 09:42
Last Modified:	25 Oct 2024 04:00
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/100501

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