E-scooters in Portuguese newspapers: A Social Representations perspective

The objective of this study is to explore the social representations of e-scooters in two major Portuguese online newspapers. To achieve this objective, 162 newspaper articles focused on e-scooters were automatically sourced from the Portuguese newspapers Público and Expresso and converted into two corpora. The corpora were analysed with descriptive statistics and frequency, Reinert textual clustering, Seeded Sequential Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), and Correspondence analysis. Results indicate that interest in the topic gradually declined after a fast initial growth. The discussion surrounding e-scooters was framed according to four topics: (i) Legislation, (ii) Safety, (iii) Service, and (iv) Political, with patterns varying over time. It was possible to identify an anchoring process of e-scooters to bicycles due to a high frequency of the term ”bicycle” throughout the corpus. This anchoring may have contributed to e-scooters being classified as velocípedes under Portuguese traffic law, which legally grouped them with bicycles despite significant differences. Additionally, two possible objectification processes can be observed: e-scooters are perceived as a dangerous technology and a cause of problems in public spaces. E-scooter users, a disorganised minority, were unable to challenge this negative perception and may be more easily affected by decisions such as navigation restrictions and bans than more hegemonic groups. Recognising the social representations of e-scooters in the media is essential for understanding how they are perceived and discussed, and this understanding provides valuable evidence for shifting them from objects of controversy to legitimate components of transport systems.