Conditional Publics: Shared Events and Divergent Meanings in the European Twitter Debate on the Ukraine War
This research addresses how European social media users form publics during a crisis, offering insights into polarization and public sphere dynamics, though it is incremental in building on existing social media analysis methods.
The study analyzed over 38 million geolocated tweets from 20 European countries during the Ukraine War to understand how publics debate a geopolitical crisis on social media, finding that structural polarization is driven by the exit of casual users and that opposing sides share or fracture referential frames depending on the issue type.
How do European publics debate a geopolitical crisis on social media, and do they inhabit a shared informational reality? We analyze over 38 million geolocated tweets from 20 European countries during the first eight months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Using retweet community detection and stance annotation across six issues, we identify 'hawkish' and 'doveish' opinion clusters present within almost every country studied. We find that structural polarization is driven not by radicalization, but by the exit of casual users. Crucially, whether opposing sides orient to the same events depends on the issue. On pragmatist issues, both sides react to the same high-profile events, forming an agonistic public sphere. Instead, on interpretive issues, they operate as affective publics and counterpublics constructing divergent meanings. We propose conditional publics to describe formations whose relational structure, sharing or fracturing a referential frame, depends on the epistemic character of the debated issue.