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

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.