The State of the Union 2018 discussion online
by Francesca Arcostanzo and Alexander Damiano Ricci
The 2018 State of the Union conference organised by the European University Institute (EUI) that took place in Fiesole and Florence on May 10 and 11 triggered a strong online debate among participants, stakeholders and the general public.
During the two days, the EuVisions observatory monitored discussions related to the main event-hashtag #SoU2018.
How many tweets?
Over the two days, Twitter users sent 4,512 tweets containing #SoU2018. The following graph highlights the distribution over time of tweets. The two peaks point at highest activity rates on the occasion of the speeches held respectively by the President of the European Commission, Jean Claude Juncker, and the President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi.
Tweet overtime
Overall, the main languages used on Twitter during the conference were English (75.5%), Italian (16.3%) and French (4.2%).
Top languages
Tweeting about what?
By means of a co-hashtag analysis, it is possible to look at which topics were highlighted the most within the general stream of tweets. The following chart lists the 15 most used hashtags coupled with #SoU2018.
Top hashtags
By means of a word cloud focusing on a wider set of hashtags, even other topics emerge, such as #africa, #airpollution #climatechange.
Hashtag word cloud
Who’s who?
Finally, the following three charts show which Twitter accounts were most active, on the one hand, and which were most retweeted and mentioned, on the other one. In all graphs, the official account of the event, @euisou, stands out as a key reference.
Top active users
Top RT account
Top mentioned accounts
This report was realised on the occasion of the conference “State of the Union 2018”
Originally published at EuVisions.
