Conditional Publics: Shared Events and Divergent Meanings in the European Twitter Debate on the Ukraine War

TL;DR

This study analyzes European Twitter debates on the Ukraine War, revealing how shared or divergent meanings emerge depending on the issue type, with structural polarization driven by casual user exit.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of 'conditional publics' to explain how relational structures in social media debates depend on issue epistemics.

Findings

Presence of 'hawkish' and 'doveish' opinion clusters across countries

Structural polarization driven by casual user exit rather than radicalization

Shared events influence opinions on pragmatist issues, divergent meanings on interpretive issues

Abstract

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.