Social Media in Syrian Refugee Crisis

Abstract

Purpose – The current Syrian refugee crisis in Europe demonstrates the role and potential of social media in improving refugee accommodation policy. We are increasingly moving towards highly interconnected and interdependent societal systems where social media plays an important role in supporting the flow of information by connecting local information to a global level in a timely manner. The authors suggest that timely transfer of local information to a global level can help support the development of collective action necessary for driving major global policy changes towards humanitarian crisis such as the current Syrian refugee crisis in Europe. In this research, we observe Twitter data on the Syrian refugee crisis from August to September 2015 to explore how social media disseminate the information on the Syrian refugee crisis and what influences are brought about by the social media.

Design/methodology/approach – This study takes Twitter as a major data source to observe the general tendency and diffusion of information on the Syrian refugee crisis. The observation period of this study is from 16th of August to 14th of September 2015, which contains a total number of 1,139,846 tweets on Syrian refugees in Twitter. From the whole tendency, it can be seen that there were a few tweets about Syrian refugees before the 2nd of September and after that day. The total number of tweets after the 2nd of September takes up to 82% of total volume of postings during the August month. The number reached the peak sharply on the 3rd of September with 126,422 tweets. After the peak users on Twitter still maintained a high degree of concern on this crisis until now. We can find that the 2nd of September is the turning point in this crisis. Then we collect the top tweets from the 2nd of September to see the hot topics that the public pays attention to (figure 4). It can be seen from figure 4 that the top tweet on the 2nd of September is about the Syrian three-year-old dead boy. We can regard this news as the trigger point of the following serious discussion and high attention on the Syrian refugee crisis. Through the timeline of top tweets, it can be seen five days later, facing the fierce humanitarian pressure, some governments began to announce plans and new policies for aiding Syrian refugees. Britain, Venezuela and the U.S. successively claimed that they will receive a certain number of Syrian refugees in the following years. This is a good sign for relieving this crisis. To further see the influence of social media on this event, we analyzed the geographic distribution of mainly participants, lexical diversity of tweet content and the dissemination pathway of information.

Originality/value - We first display the trend of numbers of tweets, geographic distribution of participants and a part of top tweets. We extract the popular hashtags on this event and analyze the lexical diversity of tweet contents. To further visualize the diffusion of this event on Twitter, we collect a sample from one hot tweet and map the retweeting network, which can show the influence of social media on this crisis. The research reveals that social media with close interaction, rapid transmission and easy accessibility plays an important role in reshaping policy towards the Syrian refugee crisis.

Practical implications –The research reveals that social media with close interaction, rapid transmission and easy accessibility plays an important role in reshaping policy towards the Syrian refugee crisis.

Keywords – Social media, Syrian refugee crisis, Twitter

Paper type – Academic Research Paper