Up next in our ECREA 2018 panel is Christian Nuernbergk, who presents our work on the social media activities of journalists; the slides are embedded below. We are interested here in how journalists have incorporated social media like Twitter into their professional toolkits, but also in how audiences engage with them and how journalists respond in turn (if indeed they do). Studies of how ordinary Twitter users engage with journalists on an everyday basis are especially rare still.

We focus here on Australia, Germany, and the …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Javier Ruiz Soler, whose interest is in locating a transnational public sphere on Twitter, in the context of the EU. Many scholars are sceptical of the idea of a European public sphere, due to language and national differences, while others point to the emergence of a growing overlap between national communities and discussions.

Javier addressed these questions by studying hashtags such as #Schengen and #TTIP, as genuine pan-European issues that invite high levels of contestation. Transnationality in such data should be detected especially in countries that have high levels of …

The second speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Judith Möller, who shifts our attention to the Habermasian concept of the public sphere, or Öffentlichkeit. In its original conception, this appears only in enlightened discussion – for instance in the coffeehouses of the 19th century –, and it is highly disputable whether this translates to an online and social media environment.

For instance, does Twitter provide the basis for a public sphere? It is public, interactive, and dynamic, and therefore exhibits some of the basic features of a public sphere; journalists frequently regard it as a representation of the …

The first panel on this final day of ECREA 2018 starts early (!), and begins with Frederic Guerrero-Solé. His work examines the overlaps of retweet networks for the posts of Spanish politicians and media. Frederic considers such retweeters to be active audiences for politicians; more passive audiences would be able to be studied by examining the followers of these accounts, but this is considerably more difficult.

In spite of the rhetoric, retweets are very often posted as a form of endorsement for these politicians; this tends to mean that overlaps between the retweet networks for politicians of different ideologies tend …