How do European publics debate a geopolitical crisis on social media, and do they inhabit a shared informational reality? We analyze over 38 million geolocated tweets from 20 European countries during the first eight months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Using retweet community detection and stance annotation across six issues, we identify 'hawkish' and 'doveish' opinion clusters present within almost every country studied. We find that structural polarization is driven not by radicalization, but by the exit of casual users. Crucially, whether opposing sides orient to the same events depends on the issue. On pragmatist issues, both sides react to the same high-profile events, forming an agonistic public sphere. Instead, on interpretive issues, they operate as affective publics and counterpublics constructing divergent meanings. We propose conditional publics to describe formations whose relational structure, sharing or fracturing a referential frame, depends on the epistemic character of the debated issue.

翻译：欧洲公众如何在社交媒体上辩论地缘政治危机？他们是否共享同一个信息现实？我们分析了俄罗斯入侵乌克兰前八个月期间来自20个欧洲国家的超过3800万条地理定位推文。通过使用转发社区检测和六个议题上的立场标注，我们在几乎所有研究的国家中识别出“鹰派”和“鸽派”意见集群。我们发现，结构极化并非由激进化驱动，而是由偶然用户的退出所驱动。关键在于，对立双方是否关注同一事件取决于议题的性质。在实用主义议题上，双方都对同一高关注事件做出反应，形成对抗性公共领域。相反，在解释性议题上，他们作为情感公众和反公众运作，建构出分歧的意义。我们提出“有条件的公众”这一概念，用以描述那些共享或分裂参照框架的关系结构取决于所辩论议题认识论特征的形成模式。