Platforms, fractures, and affective solidarities

Systemic crises disrupt cultural production and collective meaning-making, yet digital platforms increasingly mediate how societies articulate identity, value, and solidarity under disruption. Drawing on platform theory and affective publicness, this study examines how Spanish cultural discourse was reconfigured on Twitter during the early COVID-19 pandemic (2019–2020). Analyzing 78,908 geolocated tweets through computational topic modeling, discrete emotion mapping, and spatial-temporal analysis, we trace shifts in thematic salience, geographic distribution, and affective valence before and during the national lockdown. Results reveal twelve discursive topics that consolidate into three cultural themes: artistic production, culture as everyday practice, and dimensions of Spanish identities. Geospatial mapping demonstrates how platformed visibility reproduces Spain’s historical territorial pluralism—Mediterranean corridors express hybrid regional-cosmopolitan identities, Madrid anchors institutional and national framing, and peripheral municipalities negotiate cultural equity through critical advocacy. Crisis conditions did not homogenize digital culture; instead, they catalyzed affective realignment, intensifying positively framed regional solidarity, shifting discourse from celebratory consumption to infrastructural preservation, and polarizing sentiment around social and resource inequality. These findings challenge dominant narratives of crisis-driven national cohesion, demonstrating that platforms function as agonistic cultural fields where territorial pluralism is preserved, amplified, and emotionally mobilized under systemic disruption. The study advances digital sociology and computational cultural studies by theorizing platform-mediated crisis discourse as a site of structural negotiation rather than cultural erasure, and offers empirical and theoretical insights into how digital ecologies shape collective meaning-making amid societal rupture.