The global aim of the EUMEPLAT project is to analyse whether the role of media platforms in fostering or dismantling European identity and assess the positive and negative externalities stemming from the platformisation of media. This means that the project is guided by the confluence or divergence between two main concepts: europeanisation and platformisation. Within the EUMEPLAT project, the role of Work Package 2 is to investigate the platformisation of journalism in Europe and the surging of ‘fake news’. Task 2.2. of this Work Package - to which this report responds - deals specifically with “The platformisation of News in Ten Countries”, aiming to assess how news about Europe and about the issues that more concern european citizens are produced and circulated on social media platforms. The research questions are two: 1) Which are the most relevant issues debated in social media platforms in Europe and how are european citizens debating about them?; 2) Which debate is taking place at the intersection of top-level professional and bottom-level non-professional communication on social media? To collect data to respond to these questions and assess the platformisation of news in Europe, we developed a methodological framework to extract and analyse relevant data from social media platforms in ten countries (Cardoso et al., 2021). The fundamental features of that methodological framework are described in the next section, including the steps taken to select a sample of social media posts and videos and the criteria to analyse the content of those social media posts and videos. This means those social media posts and videos - some published by news media outlets, others by common citizens or political agents - are this research’s unit of analysis and the media objects we will be dissecting in this report. The option for this kind of research stems from the fact that, increasingly, citizens receive their information when using media platforms, significantly including social media platforms (Newman et al., 2021). To know how Europe is approached on social media platforms we collected data from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in the countries that constitute the sample using the same tools and methodological framework to allow comparability. We aim to identify what types of content are most relevant on those platforms, which actors are more prominent, which subjects are predominantly addressed in those posts and how Europe and Europeanity or Europeanisation are viewed on those publications with higher engagement online. The goal of this report is to be able to compare results in different countries to understand which are the most relevant issues being debated on social media about Europe and european citizens and what is the role of news media in relation to overall user of those platforms (including policial agents) in spreading information about Europe and european issues. This report is divided into two parts. In the first part, we analyse the results for the 10 countries overall. In this part we will not address results in each country but rather look at the data for all of them and compare the results. In the second part, we collect the reports authored by the teams in each country about the context and the results in their own country. The first part of the report starts with a brief explanation of the methodology that was employed to collect and analyse the data, with an emphasis on the criteria used to code that data as well as the measures taken to assure its reliability. In the section dedicated to the analysis of the results, we first look at the overall distribution of the posts collected by country/language, dimension of analysis and social media platform. Following that overall look, we dive into the post format most used in our sample, both overall and filtered by dimension and platform. Then we analyse the results relative to the agents who posted the media objects of the sample to determine which kind of actors are more relevant and how news media posts compare with the other actors. Following that, we focus on the subject matter (or subject matters) included in those social media posts and videos, to determine, not only which issues are primarily addressed, but also who addresses them. We conclude this section by analysing what dimensions of Europeanisation are included in those posts. This analysis follows on the drawing of a semantic map of Europeanisation (Carpentier et al., 2022) and uses a set of operational definitions to determine to which dimension of Europeanisation a post pertains (more on that in the next section, about methodology). In the following section we’ll discuss the results in the overall context of the platformisation of news and of the appropriation of that platformisation of news by media and non-media agents to advance their interests and goals. We will also discuss how results frame the question of how Europe and european issues are presented and debated on leading social media platforms in Europe. In this section, we expect to be able to answer the two research questions and shed some clarity on how European issues are being debated on social media platforms and how news media and non- media content interact on those platforms. We will conclude by identifying new lines of research that are opened by our analysis or that remain insufficiently studied. We also consider that this report does not exhaust the analysis of the data that was gathered nor the field of research overall and more research on this topic will be needed to deepen our comprehension of how social media platforms influence the debate of relevant issues in Europe and how they affect the process of Europeanisation. In the second part of this report, the reader will find the national reports produced by each team of EUMEPLAT partners analysing and contextualising the results for their country. These reports are of utmost importance as the specific context in each country significantly impacts its results and is particularly relevant for the understanding of the specific nature of social media contents. This part is organised by country, in an alphabetic order. In the annexes, the reader is also encouraged to view the codebook used to categorise the social media posts and videos as well as the measures of inter coder reliability in applying it.

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Relatório final de projecto internacional