Description
The outbreak of Covid-19 constituted a major challenge for the European Union (EU) as its capacity to manage the pandemic and to coordinate member states’ responses to the crisis was severely put to the test. This paper seeks to analyze the EU’s use of social media during the outbreak. Specifically, the paper will examine which issues the EU addressed online and how these issues changed as the pandemic spread across the continent. Using thematic analysis, all tweets published by the EEAS and the President of the EU commission between March and August of 2019 will be analyzed so as to identify the issues addressed by the EU throughout different pandemic stages (e.g., spread of Covid19 to Spain and Italy, Germany, UK and Eastern Europe). In a second stage, social network analysis will be applied to map the clusters of member states’ responses to the EU digital campaign (e.g., supportive, critical, passive). In so doing, the study will provide a comprehensive account of the EU digital crisis management during the pandemic and discuss a set of conditions by which digital collaboration between the European Commission and the member states can be improved in times of crisis.
