Communicating the Crisis: The European Commission on Social Media During the Economic Crisis in the European Union

Looking at the official European Commission social media in the period of the economic crisis in Europe, the aim of this study is to test optimistic (Browning 2002, Coleman 2003; Hill & Hughes 1998; Ward, Gibson & Nixon 2003) and pessimistic (Kavanaugh 2002, Norris 2001) views about the role of the Internet in political communication. Relying on the optimistic ideas that social media can improve communication between representatives and the represented, we test to see if the European Commission used Facebook in order to improve communication with citizens. We use discourse analysis as a qualitative content analysis to look at status messages on the EC official Facebook page from 2010 until the end of 2012, focusing on which themes were encouraged by the EC and in which way did the EC communicate the crises to European citizens. Moreover, conducting a content analysis as a quantitative analysis we examine how often each theme was in the main focus of the status update.