A Digital Movement of Opinion? Contesting Austerity Through Social Media

Barisione, Mauro; Cerón, Andrea

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-59890-5_4

Cited by 35 publications

(47 citation statements)

References 29 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…But once this candidate is brought into the electoral race, his/her continuing support, now confronted with political oppositions, falls under the umbrella of institutionalized electoral competition and is no longer a DMO. 4 The patterns of interaction between a DMO and non-digital manifestations of the same movement of opinion are analyzed in Barisione and Ceron (2017). 5 https://twitter.com/twitter/status/639500090529288192 .…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our theoretical proposal aims to capture and emphasize the increasing and relatively autonomous importance of the online dimension of political participation by conceptualizing digital movements of opinion as a specific manifestation both of digital activism and social networking site (SNS)-mediated public opinion. In our formulation, which elaborates on Barisione and Ceron (2017), a digital movement of opinion (DMO) consists of spontaneous online mobilizations of the mass publics, which temporarily turn into an active public, usually as a reaction to a contingent, emotionally laden societal issue or policy measure. As such, DMOs are characterized by the presence of comments that are virtually one-sided (e.g.…”

Section: Theoretical Framework: Digital Movement Of Opinion and Twittmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, hashtag-based networks structured around simple retweet, reply or mention relations are particularly suitable for the type of longitudinal analyses tracking network variations over time, which are required for locating and profiling a DMO. These communicative networks allow us to track topics that do not reflect only a single, isolated piece of breaking news, but a wider process or a more complex chain of events, such as protests against #Austerity policies in Europe (Barisione & Ceron, 2017) or mobilizations against #DilmaRoussef in Brasil (Calvo et al, 2016). Moreover, if the general topic is addressed by main hashtag #X, other hashtags linking to it may offer more nuanced frames for the same topic and can therefore denote an interpretation, a judgment or a possible remedy for the issue on hand.…”

Section: Theoretical Framework: Digital Movement Of Opinion and Twittmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Understanding a digital movement of opinion: the case of #RefugeesWelcome

Barisione

Michailidou

Airoldi

2017

Information, Communication & Society

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Twitter: @AsiminaMiUnderstanding a digital movement of opinion: The case of #RefugeesWelcome Recent work on digital political engagement has extensively shown that social media platforms enhance political participation and collective action. However, the idea that citizen voice through social media can give rise, under given conditions, to a specific digital force combining properties of social movements and public opinion has received less attention. We fill this gap by analysing the digital discussion around the Twitter hashtag #RefugeesWelcome as a case of 'digital movement of opinion' (DMO). When the refugee crisis erupted in 2015, an extraordinary wave of empathy characterized the publics' reactions in key European hosting countries, especially as a result of viral images portraying refugee children as the main victims. Using a triangulation of network, content and metadata analysis, we find that this DMO was driven primarily by social media elites whose tweets were then echoed by masses of isolated users. We then test the post-DMO status of the hashtag-sphere after a potentially antithetical shock such as the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, which polarized the network public. Overall, we argue that the concept of digital movement of opinion provides a heuristically useful tool for future research on new forms of digital citizen participation.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Theoretical Framework: Digital Movement Of Opinion and Twittmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Theoretical Framework: Digital Movement Of Opinion and Twittmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Understanding a digital movement of opinion: the case of #RefugeesWelcome

Barisione

Michailidou

Airoldi

2017

Information, Communication & Society

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The use of a public platform, such as Twitter, for obtaining bottom-up perspectives can yield knowledge on the content of users' discussions on these issues and how they conduct them. Indeed, the use of social networking sites and other digital media platforms has expanded the public space for expressing opinions and mobilizing citizens (Barisione & Ceron, 2017). Among all of the available algorithms for conducting sentiment analysis, iSA, developed by the Voices from the Blogs at the University of Milan (Ceron et al, 2016a), was selected for the data analysis.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Commenting on Political Topics Through Twitter: Is European Politics European?

Ruiz-Soler

Curini

Cerón

2019

Social Media + Society

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The aim of this study was to explore social media, and specifically Twitter’s potential to generate a European demos. Our use of data derived from social media complements the traditional use of mass media and survey data within existing studies. We selected two Twitter hashtags of European relevance, # schengen and # ttip, to test several theories on a European demos (non-demos, European democracy, or pan-European demos) and to determine which of these theories was most applicable in the case of Twitter topics of European relevance. To answer the research question, we performed sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis performed on data gathered on social media platforms, such as Twitter, constitutes an alternative methodological approach to more formal surveys (e.g., Eurobarometer) and mass media content analysis. Three dimensions were coded: (1) sentiments toward the issue public, (2) sentiments toward the European Union (EU), and (3) the type of framing. Among all of the available algorithms for conducting sentiment analysis, integrated sentiment analysis (iSA), developed by the Blog of Voices at the University of Milan, was selected for the data analysis. This is a novel supervised algorithm that was specifically designed for analyses of social networks and the Web 2.0 sphere (Twitter, blogs, etc.), taking the abundance of noise within digital environments into consideration. An examination and discussion of the results shows that for these two hashtags, the results were more aligned with the demoicracy and “European lite identity” models than with the model of a pan-European demos.

show abstract

“…Coupled with the perception of the EU as a club of interest-driven countries, they find overall low levels of EU politicisation (see also Hurrelmann et al., 2015). Barisione and Ceron (2017) study the contestation of austerity politics on Twitter in the run up to the 2014 elections of the European Parliament (EP). The authors show that there is no increase in the mentioning of the EU, EU-level actors or other member states during the election campaign, contrary to their expectation.…”

Section: Citizens Institutions and The Politicisation Of The Eumentioning

confidence: 99%

Much ado about nothing? The (non-) politicisation of the European Union in social media debates on migration

Ademmer

Leupold

Stöhr

2018

European Union Politics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The widespread view that the refugee crisis has sparked unprecedented levels of European Union politicisation has rarely been backed by systematic empirical evidence. We investigate this claim using a novel dataset of several thousand user comments posted below articles of German regional media outlets on Facebook. Despite considerable European Union authority in the policy area, extensive media coverage of the crisis and the rise of a populist party in Germany, our results suggest that the politicisation of Europe remains low among social media users, especially when compared to national and subnational levels of governance. When talking about Europe, users hardly refer to European Union institutions or policies. Instead, other member states and notions of the geographic or cultural space dominate the debate.

show abstract

A Digital Movement of Opinion? Contesting Austerity Through Social Media

Cited by 35 publications

References 29 publications

Understanding a digital movement of opinion: the case of #RefugeesWelcome

Understanding a digital movement of opinion: the case of #RefugeesWelcome

Commenting on Political Topics Through Twitter: Is European Politics European?

Much ado about nothing? The (non-) politicisation of the European Union in social media debates on migration

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About