Abstract

There is an increase in Euroscepticism among EU citizens nowadays, as shown by the development of the ultra-nationalist parties among the European states. Regarding the European Union membership, public opinion is divided in two. British referendum in 2016, where citizens chose to “exit” shaking the public opinion, and the following general election in June 2017, where the British Europeanist parties won the election according to the 1975 British referendum where 72% of citizens chose to “Remain”, are clear examples of this fracture. There are still few studies concerning the investigation of Brexit discourses within the social media and most of them focus on the 2016 British referendum. Due to that, this exploratory research aims to identify how Brexit and the EU are nowadays discussed on Twitter, through a text mining approach. We collected all the tweets containing the terms “Brexit” and “EU”, for a period of 10 days. Data collection has been performed with TwitteR package, resulting in a large corpus to which we applied multivariate techniques in order to identify the contents and the sentiments behind the shared comments.

Download