Europeanization on Twitter? Mapping the Transnational Migration Discourse

• In Event: What Makes It Go Viral?

Abstract

Social media is a borderless space of interaction and communication. This study investigates if and how social media lead to an increased trans-nationalization of the digital public discourse in Europe. Specifically, we analyze the discourse on Twitter on the issue of migration, an issue that it is trans-national by nature, has led to conflict between national and EU institutions and actors and, thereby, is often considered one of the main arenas of political polarization (Ademmer and Stöhr 2019).
We innovate theoretically by transferring the concept of Europeanization (Risse 2015, Trenz 2008) to the study of social media. We do this by operationalizing Europeanization through language and define it as occurring whenever non-native English users tweet in English to reach users outside their own domestic language sphere. We consider English to be of primary importance in the Europeanization process, for three reasons. English is the principal language in which European institutions communicate with citizens. It is also the language of preference for other state and non-state actors with an active presence in more than one state. Most fundamentally, English is the most common foreign language acquired by Europeans and de-facto lingua franca of the internet. For the purposes of our study, the supranational arena of shared conversations is therefore directly linked to the use of English. Hence, we decided to include in our analysis English tweets and retweets – but only if they originate from users whose first Twitter language is not English (and if they are made by an official EU institution account).
We borrow from the Europeanization of policy literature (Börzel, 2002) the idea of up- and downloading, but instead of policy transfer, we focus on information connections. Thus, uploading is tweeting in English from a non-native user and downloading is sharing an English tweet by a non-native user.
We also innovate methodologically by using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze ~5,000,000 tweets from 755,000 users during the period 2014-2019, in eight language spheres: German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish. The analysis charts the connections between users and their posts using a triangulation of methods: network mapping and statistical modeling of all users and their content, and a qualitative identification and labeling of the most influential users within each language sphere.
Our social network analysis shows that the most influential users within a language are not connected outside their own language cluster, thus they are not Europeanized. However, when looking at non-English natives who tweet in English, there is a noticeable level of interconnectivity beyond language clusters, based primarily on like-mindedness on migration: pro- and anti-migration users form two, largely separated, clusters of transnational connections.
Only three accounts of EU institutions appeared in the top-20 list of most influential users within each sphere, that being EUinDE, Europarl ES, and Europarl IT. EU institutions appear only at the periphery of the network and are primarily connected with users with positive views on migration.
While the most prevalent actor type (politician, media, civil society or individual) varies by each language cluster, if we look at the most retweeted English-language accounts across the data we find that alternative media and individual accounts are the most shared, and that they tend to espouse negative views on migration. Civil society actors are the type most associated with pro-migration content.
Our conclusions are that 1) there is a Europeanized discourse on migration on Twitter; 2) the process is driven primarily through uploading and to a lesser extent via downloading of messages to and from Europeans’ digital shared sphere of communication; and 3) the most active actors in the process display views critical to migration. In addition, we discover a clear polarization of allegiances within the trans-national European sphere. On the one hand, we find a strongly bonded cluster of users opposed to migration, and, on the other hand, a clearly separated second cluster of users either supportive or neutral in the matter, dominated by accounts linked to NGOs and political institutions. We thus conclude that there are two, not one, public discourses on migration that are Europeanized.
References
Ademmer, E., & Stöhr, T. (2019). The making of a new cleavage? Evidence from social media debates about migration (No. 2140). Kiel Working Paper.
Börzel, T. A. (2002). Member state responses to Europeanization. JCMS, 40(2), 193-214
Risse, T. (Ed.). (2015). European public spheres. Cambridge UP.
Trenz, H. J. (2008). Measuring the Europeanisation of public communication. European Political Science, 7(3), 273-284.

Authors

• Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, Lund University

• Mike Farjam, Lund University