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

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.05800v1
• Date: Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:36:21 GMT
• Title: Conditional Publics: Shared Events and Divergent Meanings in the European Twitter Debate on the Ukraine War
• Abstract summary: We analyze over 38 million geolocated tweets from 20 European countries during the first eight months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.<n>We find that structural polarization is driven not by radicalization, but by the exit of casual users.
• Score: 5.889115248700539
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• 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.

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