Summary

  • The Coronavirus health crisis is, by far, the top event of 2020, which is also reflected by the considerable number of mentions and views generated in Romanian online media and social media. The numbers are impressive – over 7 million mentions, which led to over 7 billion views in total. It is a landmark event which we introduced in our analysis in order to have a clearer view and a useful comparison ground for our main topics of interest.
  • Regarding the international actors, the US, the EU and Germany dominate the mentions ranking in 2020, both in terms of their number and their impact, thus being the most present actors in the Romanian online space among the countries and institutions we analysed.
    • At the same time, throughout the year, Israel and NATO were the least mentioned online from the group of geopolitical actors included in our analysis.
  • The coronavirus crisis has massively influenced the topics associated with the international actors included in the analysis.
    • Thus, coronavirus was associated, at various times, with all the actors mentioned in the present analysis, and pandemic-related evolutions or events accounted for several moments of visibility in each actor’s timeline.
    • Only in the case of NATO, the media coverage was not constantly linked to the evolution of the epidemic crisis.
  • Beyond the coronavirus crisis, there were global political events that generated media coverage in the Romanian online space for the monitored international actors.
    • Most notable in this list were the elections in the United States of America, the official exit of Great Britain from the European Union, the diplomatic tensions between France and Turkey.
  • For all international actors, the mentions in online media had a higher impact than the mentions on social networks (Facebook mainly).

The full study (in Romanian) is available here