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

2026-04-07

AI Summary

This study investigates whether European publics shared a common informational reality during the Russia-Ukraine war and examines the structure and drivers of their opinion divergence on social media. Analyzing over 38 million geolocated tweets from 20 countries, combined with retweet network community detection and human-annotated stance labels across six key issues, the research identifies pervasive “hawkish” and “dovish” clusters. It introduces the concept of “conditional publics,” demonstrating that opinion convergence or fragmentation hinges on issue characteristics: pragmatic issues foster an adversarial public sphere, whereas interpretive issues generate affective publics and counterpublics rooted in competing meaning-making frameworks. Findings reveal that structural polarization stems primarily from disengagement by ordinary users rather than ideological extremization, and that public response patterns differ markedly between the two issue types.

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.

Problem

• public sphere
• social media
• geopolitical crisis
• informational reality
• polarization

Innovation

• conditional publics
• agonistic public sphere
• affective publics
• structural polarization
• retweet community detection