Europe Day and the Fall of the Berlin Wall on Twitter/X: Conflict, Tone, and Deliberative Quality Across France, Germany, Italy, and Slovenia

This article compares how two major European commemorations—Europe Day (9 May) and the fall of 
the Berlin Wall (9 November)—are discussed on Twitter/X in Slovenia, Italy, Germany, and France. We 
conceptualise commemorations as activation frames: recurring cues that invite users to interpret 
contemporary political conflicts through the lens of salient European historical events. However, rather 
than focusing only on what people discuss, we examine whether disagreement is present and how it is 
expressed. Using an LLM-assisted coding scheme, we apply a three-step design: (A) we identify whether 
posts are conflictual; (B) within conflict, we distinguish non-antagonistic from antagonistic tone, using 
incivility as a proxy; and (C) we assess deliberative quality using DQI-style indicators, comparing the 
share of high-quality discussion across antagonistic and non-antagonistic modes. This design enables 
direct cross-country comparisons of whether commemorative talk is mostly ceremonial and low-conflict, 
confrontational in tone, or conflictual yet characterised by reason-giving and constructive engagement. 
Finally, we use topic modelling as an additional diagnostic layer to identify thematic hotspots in where 
conflict, antagonistic tone, and lower deliberative quality concentrate, as well as clusters where 
deliberative signals persist even under antagonistic tone. The approach enables cross-national 
comparison of conflict, tone, and deliberative quality in commemorative Twitter/X debates, and can 
help identify changes in discourse quality in digital public spheres.