@marcoRecorder
As Tony Barber puts it “With flashes of wit, much earnestness and a certain reluctance to go for the jugular of their opponents, four candidates for the European Commission presidency broke new ground on Monday night by holding a live televised debate designed to drum up public interest in the May 22-25 elections for the European parliament.”
Whether some people disagree over the interest, the engagement or the passion displayed by the four candidates, I think this was a very good exercise for the creation of a European online public space, as already theorized by Tony Lockett. Almost 46.000 mentions of #EUdebate2014 on 28 April represented a quite significant value in terms of engagement around the first real pan-European debate for the candidates to the Presidency of the European Commission.
How involved were the people on social media? Let’s have a look.
Here is a wordcloud of the most used words on social media together with #EUdebate2014.
We see the hashtags related to the campaigns of Juncker, Schulz and Verhofstadt (#withJuncker, #nowschulz, #guy4europe) were rather prominently used together also with reference the great selfie taken ahead of the dialogue.
The Selfie of the #EUdebate2014 @porcarorama @sergiovinay @SkaKeller @MartinSchulz @JunckerEU @GuyVerhofstadt pic.twitter.com/jKQSbhrH2l #selfEU
— Guy Verhofstadt (@GuyVerhofstadt) April 28, 2014
By the way, for a collection of European elections-related selfie you should check out this Pinterest board by Dana Manescu Continue reading “#EUdebate2014 and social media: who won?”