Abstract
This article reflects on the discursive representation, legal, and practical challenges of locating, classifying, and publishing citizens’ views of the EU in digital media discourse. We start with the discursive representation challenge of locating and identifying citizens’ voices in social and news media discourse. The second set of challenges pertains to the legal, regulatory framework guiding research ethics on personal data but also cuts across the academic debate on what constitutes “public” discourse in the digital public sphere. The third set of challenges are practical but of no less consequence. Here we bring in the issue of marketisation of the public sphere and of the digital commons, and how these processes affect the ethics but also the feasibility and reliability of digital public sphere analysis. Thereby we illustrate that barriers to content analysis can make data collection practically challenging, feeding dilemmas with data reliability and research ethics. These methodological and empirical challenges are illustrated and unpacked with examples from the Benchmark project, which analysed the extent to which citizens drive EU contestation on social and digital news media. Our study focuses on UK public discourse on a possible European Economic Area solution, and the reactions such discourse may have triggered in two EU-associated countries, Norway and Switzerland, in the post-Brexit referendum period 2016–2019. We thus take a broad European perspective of EU contestation that is not strictly confined within the EU public sphere(s). The case study illustrates the research process and the emerging empirical challenges and concludes with reflections and practical suggestions for future research projects.
Highlights
Capturing citizen‐driven contestation of the EU has always been a challenge in European public sphere research, not least because the very existence of a European public sphere has been the subject of scholarly dispute for nearly three decades (Baisnée, 2007; Risse & van de Steeg, 2003; Scharpf, 1994)
Most news con‐ tent is behind paywalls, and social media platforms such as Twitter have restricted or removed access to their historical archives whilst implementing an often‐ aggressive monetisation strategy toward the metadata their users generate. This brings the related challenge of researchers need‐ ing to be profi‐ cient in computational social science methods, such as data scraping, data preparation for analysis, and data manipulation (Mayr & Weller, 2016)
In the course of our analysis, we only temporar‐ ily stored information on individuals whose names and statements appeared in the documents that we analy‐ sed. We have included this relevant piece of informa‐ tion in a disclaimer published on the project’s webpage, where we further included a declaration that general data protection regulation (GDPR) rights apply for all persons whose data we would be processing throughout the course of the project
Summary
Capturing citizen‐driven contestation of the EU has always been a challenge in European public sphere research, not least because the very existence of a European public sphere has been the subject of scholarly dispute for nearly three decades (Baisnée, 2007; Risse & van de Steeg, 2003; Scharpf, 1994). The multiple discursive repre‐ sentations, legal, and practical challenges media scholars are confronted with when analysing citizens’ views of the EU in digital media discourse are the subject of continu‐ ous academic scrutiny, as the light‐speed digital public sphere constantly changes We examine these three dis‐ tinct yet interrelated challenges by drawing on our empir‐ ical research into Brexit contestation as this unfolded in professional (online) news media and on the social media platform Twitter. After the opti‐ mism of the digital public sphere’s early days (e.g., Trenz, 2009), it is difficult to argue today that social media have brought the end of public sphere elites This creates considerable challenges of representativeness and relia‐ bility with media analysis when trying to gain insight into the extent of citizen engagement in EU contestation in digital news media. Based on our insight from the research process and findings, we finish with a discussion before concluding
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