The personalization, circulation, impact and reception in Twitter of Macron´s 17/04/18 speech to the European Parliament

Abstract

On April, 17th 2018, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in the Plenary of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, appealed to the "renaissance of European sovereignty". The article analyzes the functions attributed to the preferred social network for debate and political discussion, Twitter, focusing essentially on: the distribution of information, the impact of the social network on the modification of the public agenda, the personalization of the transmission of political discourses in social networks, as well as new habits of political consumption specifically, in the context of Twitter. The results show that: 1) journalists have a key role in the descriptive phase towards national publics but a less salient one in the emerging transnational sphere where political actors target their own publics directly; 2) EU institutions failed to try to set the agenda setting through hashtags without success; 3) Macron is a transnational political actor capable of communicating through fragmented public spaces; 4) The content of the messages passes very quickly from a descriptive to a framing approach.