The 10th edition of the YoFest has taken place on June 1-2 in Strasbourg, together with the 3rd edition of the European Youth Event.

During the two days of debates, live music and many other activities, EuVisions monitored online conversations about the YoFest.

How much people tweeted

From June 1 to 2 we collected 1,271 tweets about the YoFest. The graph below shows the distribution of these conversations over the two days.

Figure1: Distribution of tweets per day and hour

The first and highest peak corresponds to the speech held by the President of the EU Parliament Antonio Tajani on the outside stage of the YoFest, followed closely by a second burst of tweets in correspondence to the most watched events of the first day of YoFest, such as the panel about violence against women and the one about the future of the #MeToo movement. The last peak corresponds to the performance on the stage of Madeleina Kay, a British singer who campaigns against Brexit.

In which languages

English is confirmed as the lingua franca in Twitter conversations on EU related issues, with the 89.24% of tweets being in English, followed at a considerable distance by French (4.75%) and Spanish (4.03%).

Figure 2: Top 10 languages

About what

To investigate the topics of discussion, we identified the top 30 hashtags and words used in tweets related to the YoFest and plotted them in two word clouds.

Figure 3: Top 30 used Hashtag

Figure 4: Top 30 used words

What emerges from the graphs above seems to be a focus on today world’s challenges (sustainable development, #futureofeurope, digital skills) and the role of young people in facing these challenges (#youthworkchangeslife, young european, #youthup).

Who participated in the discussion

Among the 635 users who tweeted about YoFest, we looked at who were mostly involved in the online debate. The three graphs below show the most active, the most retweeted and the most mentioned users respectively.

Figure 5: Top 10 active users

Figure 6: Top 10 Retweeted users

Figure 7: Top 10 mentioned users

Which networks emerged

To see if and how these users interacted with each other, we conducted a network analysis of our sample, based on Retweets.

Figure 8: Network map of YoFest tweet sample based on retweets

Each node in the graph represents a user, while each edge (line) represents a link with another user. A link is created each time one user retweets another. The size of the users’ nodes and labels is proportional to the retweets received by other users. The more frequent the interaction is, the stronger the link.

By means of an algorithm working on users’ interactions, it is possible to detect different communities, highlighted above with the use of different colours.

The biggest group (coloured in green) includes the official account of the European Youth Forum (the event’s organiser) and some of its members’ accounts (François Balate, Carina Autengruber). Another group (in blue) is composed by the UN Youth Envoy Jayathma Wickramanayake and others (Valerie Duffy, Tim Vos) who took part in discussions about the climate change and about how young people can contribute to sustainable development. The third community, coloured in pink and led by Madeleina Key, is composed by YEM_UK (Young European Movement) and other British Europeanists using anti-Brexit hashtags in their accounts such as #FBPE (#FollowBackProEU) or #StopBrexit.

This report was realised on the occasion of the Yo!Fest2018 event in Strasbourg

Authors: Martina Zaghi