Identical Platform, Divergent Publics: Sweden and Finland During the 2022 NATO Crisis
2026-07-15
Digital platforms are often theorized as universal drivers of political polarization, yet empirical patterns remain inconsistent across countries. Leveraging the natural‐experiment logic of Sweden's and Finland's simultaneous 2022 NATO applications and the NATO–Turkey diplomatic crisis, this study examines how national political cultures condition the enactment of identical Twitter/X affordances. Using a most‐similar systems design, it analyzes geolocated posts from the Nordic Tweet Stream (January 2022–May 2023). Communicative structure is measured through participation inequality (Gini; top‐share‐of‐voice), and communicative behavior through @mention and #hashtag densities, complemented by qualitative profiling and a supplementary stance and framing analysis. Sweden exhibits a more concentrated, broadcast‐leaning configuration (Gini = 0.59; top 1% produce 34.1%; lower mention/hashtag densities), whereas Finland shows a more distributed structure with higher interaction/coordination proxies (Gini = 0.46; top 1% produce 20.4%; higher densities). A stance analysis reveals that both publics support NATO accession, with anti‐accession sentiment absent; the divergence lies not in substantive political position but in communicative repertoire, with Swedish discourse dominated by adversarial‐blame framing and Finnish discourse by analytical‐informational framing ( χ 2 = 117.40, p < 0.001). The findings support a “cultural filter” operating as a framing selector, linking political culture to divergent configurations of platformed publics.