Microblogging sites such as twitter have now become host to a wide spectrum of information. The culture of real time postings has generated a plethora of opinions on current issues, foods, products, and complaints on day to day life. This contemporary sharing culture has borne witness to a vast mine of text data. The text data is rich with potential for exploration by data analysts, on an almost unlimited number of topics.
This paper answers to what extend the discussions of European topics on Twitter are European or national on Twitter. Or in other words, how do users perceive topics of European relevance, as national or European? If national or European, this research illuminates how the policies attached to the issue publics mapped in this paper are seen by users and how they are framed with the European Public Sphere theories. Answering this question has implications not only on the theory of the emergence of the European public sphere, but also in the democratic development of the EU project, and for the building of a European demos. This paper is focused on the consequences of the content of the tweets gathered for the emergence of a European Public Sphere: (i) Europeanization of national public spheres versus (ii) European public sphere above the national state.
In order to answer the research question, this paper analyses the tweets over two issue publics of European relevance: #Schengen and #TTIP). The data has been gathered from the Twitter Stream API using the Twitter Capture Analysis Toolkit from Amsterdam University , in three languages (Spanish, English, Italian) and in in three different periods of time (August 2016, December 2016 and April 2017). Methodologically I make use of sentiment analysis iSA algorithm from Blog of Voices at the University of Milan for the analysis of the data. Each language provides a comparative base, as each of the languages selected is representative of different national public sphere (Spanish, Italian, German, French), or pan European -as a lingua franca- (English).
The outcomes of this paper are important to understand how a platform such Twitter contributes to a transnational dialogue about relevant European topics inside a European Public Sphere. In addition, the paper shows empirical evidence that these topics are being treated by the users as European rather than national, confirming the existence of a European demos. However, the majority of the users speak negatively about these topics.
