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The Refugee/Migrant Crisis Dichotomy on Twitter: A Network and Sentiment Perspective
Abstract and Figures
Media reports, political statements, and social media debates on the refugee/migrant crisis shape the ways in which people and societies respond to those displaced people arriving at their borders world wide. These current events are framed and experienced as a crisis, entering the media, capturing worldwide political attention, and producing diverse and contradictory discourses and responses. The labels "migrant'' and "refugee'' are frequently distinguished and conflated in traditional as well as social media when describing the same groups of people. In this paper, we focus on the simultaneous struggle over meaning, legitimization, and power in representations of the refugee crisis, through the specific lens of Twitter. The 369,485 tweets analyzed in this paper cover two days after a picture of Alan Kurdi -- a three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea while trying to reach Europe with his family -- made global headlines and sparked wide media engagement. More specifically, we investigate the existence of the dichotomy between the "deserving'' refugee versus the "undeserving'' migrant, as well as the relationship between sentiment expressed in tweets, their influence, and the popularity of Twitter users involved in this dichotomous characterization of the crisis. Our results show that the Twitter debate was predominantly focused on refugee related hashtags and that those tweets containing such hashtags were more positive in tone. Furthermore, we find that popular Twitter users as well as popular tweets are characterized by less emotional intensity and slightly less positivity in the debate, contrary to prior expectations. Co-occurrence networks expose the structure underlying hashtag usage and reveal a refugee-centric core of meaning, yet divergent goals of some prominent users. As social media become increasingly prominent venues for debate over a crisis, how and why people express their opinions offer valuable insights into the nature and direction of these debates.
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... It is notable that the overall sentiment towards migration on Twitter appeared to be positive, while acknowledging a degree of uncertainty. This finding corroborates existing research that has identified a range of sentiments expressed on social media platforms, encompassing both positive and negative views towards migration [43][44][45]. However, further investigations are necessary to delve into the distribution of these sentiments across different user groups and geographical regions. ...
... Moreover, the paper's examination of the most liked and retweeted tweets reflects a recurring theme in the literature. Other studies have also identified highly engaging tweets that address critical topics in migration discourse [43,46,47]. ...
Misinformation, in the form of false or inaccurate information deliberately created and spread through various channels, including social media, has become pervasive in the context of migration. An analysis of 45,000 English tweets revealed a wide range of attitudes towards migrants, including the presence of misinformation, concerns, and positive and negative attitudes. This study acknowledges the negative effects of misinformation, such as the formation of preconditions that promote false representations of migrants, foster negative attitudes, and consolidate prejudices against them. Misinformation also leads to mistrust among migrants towards official authorities and creates an environment conducive to exploitation by smugglers and traffickers. To address these issues, this study suggests corrective measures, including raising awareness, promoting evidence-based reasoning, and facilitating diverse forms of interpersonal dialogue.
... Hateful texts in the researched database inflict direct and indirect harm upon Ukrainians, with their principal aim being to propagate hateful beliefs. Moreover, as Poland participates in the information war with Russia and confronts fake news about the war, hateful Tweets influence the online discourse and impact social opinions (Nerghes and Lee 2018). Thus, a huge number of Tweets with negative narratives about Ukrainian refugees can increase doubts about the government's policy and manipulate the users. ...
The article focuses on anti-Ukrainian narratives spread on Twitter. We performed a Thick Big Data analysis of words and hashtags connected with anti-Ukrainian narratives. We collected 16,700 tweets from 25 January 2023 to 22 February 2023, focusing on the most popular and commented ones. Furthermore, we conducted multi-modal narrative and rhetorical analyses to distinguish the typology of narrations. This article sheds light on how vital narration in disinformation campaigns and media warfare on social media is. Most tweets contained narration highlighting the alleged appropriation of Polish culture by displaying Ukrainian nationality. Such narration strongly influences a sense of insecurity and alienation in one’s own country. We discovered that Ukrainian-related posts have negative sentiment and frequently spread disinformation.
... "Migrant" was often applied to Syrians and "displaced" ('Vertriebene') to Ukrainians. Although "Vertriebene" is not widely used in online discussions, "migrant" is and carries a specific derogatory meaning, often preferred by anti-refugee attitudinal users (Nerghes & Lee, 2018). Third, our data collection is limited by X API constraints. ...
This exploratory study adopts a mixed-methods approach to examine the dynamics of political communication during refugee crises in German-language X (formerly Twitter), focusing on the Syrian and Ukrainian refugee influxes of September 2015 and March 2022. Using the X API, we collected 551,873 tweets related to the Syrian crisis and 236,034 tweets related to the Ukrainian crisis. The retweet networks associated with both crises were segmented into attitudinal communities by labeling them based on their position toward refugees. These networks were analyzed for polarization, community interactions and activity, influential users, and the dynamic networked framing of the crises. Our social network analysis highlighted that the online anti-refugee community exhibited greater dynamism despite being smaller in size than the pro-refugee community. Elite news media saw a decline in influence, highlighting the lack of intermediary sources between polarized users. While overall net-worked framing was positive about refugees during both crises, the framing of Ukrainian refugees was more complex and multifaceted. Our results underscore the disrupted state of public discourse on controversial topics and the need to reduce destructive polarization on social media.
... Khatua and Nejdl (2021) analyzed a corpus of approximately 24,000 European migration-related tweets to classify public opinions. Similarly, a study analyzing 369,485 tweets on the refugee crisis investigated the dichotomy between deserving refugees and undeserving migrants (Nerghes & Lee, 2018). ...
This research analyzes the main topics discussed on social media in Bangladesh surrounding the Rohingya crisis. Employing thematic analysis, we qualitatively analyzed 10,907 Rohingya-related comments from an equal number of social media users. Our findings reveal that users engage in discussions centered on four main topics: asylum debates, questionable media, religious sentiments, and controversial roles. These findings further suggest that social media users, regardless of the country's development level, exhibit similar behavioral patterns toward refugees, including a certain degree of negative attitudes. The insights gained from this research can inform and guide balanced policy decisions addressing the Rohingya crisis.
... Societal perceptions about migrants also get reflected in usergenerated social media content. A handful of studies noted bipolar opinions such as deserving vis-à-vis undeserving migrants, securityrelated concerns vis-à-vis humanitarian concerns, or critical visà-vis positive opinions [24,26,29,43]. Broadly, social media data reveals two diametrically opposite views: humanitarian concerns (because migrants face discrimination in terms of societal acceptance or employment opportunities or the lack of access to basic health or education facilities) and threat perceptions (because migrants can be a cultural as well as security threats, or they can be the economic burden for the host country) [29,33,56]. ...
... The selected language is crucial, as it influences the perceived legitimacy of claims to international protection and justifies policies of exclusion and containment [14,47]. This framing of the discussion based on the migrant/refugee dichotomy has also been observed in social media debates [51]. The International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) identifies the displacement of populations due to (civil) wars and conflicts as one of the main drivers of migration flow [22]. ...
... The selected language is crucial, as it influences the perceived legitimacy of claims to international protection and justifies policies of exclusion and containment [14,47]. This framing of the discussion based on the migrant/refugee dichotomy has also been observed in social media debates [51]. The International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) identifies the displacement of populations due to (civil) wars and conflicts as one of the main drivers of migration flow [22]. ...
The war in Ukraine seems to have positively changed the attitude toward the critical societal topic of migration in Europe -- at least towards refugees from Ukraine. We investigate whether this impression is substantiated by how the topic is reflected in online news and social media, thus linking the representation of the issue on the Web to its perception in society. For this purpose, we combine and adapt leading-edge automatic text processing for a novel multilingual stance detection approach. Starting from 5.5M Twitter posts published by 565 European news outlets in one year, beginning September 2021, plus replies, we perform a multilingual analysis of migration-related media coverage and associated social media interaction for Europe and selected European countries. The results of our analysis show that there is actually a reframing of the discussion illustrated by the terminology change, e.g., from "migrant" to "refugee", often even accentuated with phrases such as "real refugees". However, concerning a stance shift in public perception, the picture is more diverse than expected. All analyzed cases show a noticeable temporal stance shift around the start of the war in Ukraine. Still, there are apparent national differences in the size and stability of this shift.
Este trabajo pone de manifiesto situaciones particulares dentro de la red social Twitter en las que los refugiados siempre son considerados de un modo negativo. Con este análisis pormenorizado lo que se pretende es demostrar cómo un colectivo tan vulnerable puede recibir comentarios tan extremos —por peyorativos—, llegando en muchos casos a alcanzar la etiqueta de “odio”. La intención última de este trabajo será generar en el lector una súbita reacción que modifique cuestiones de conciencia individuales, así como que esta vaya acompañada de una forzosa necesidad de revertir cuestiones de índole internacional con respecto a los refugiados.
Crisis response involves extensive planning and coordination within and across a multitude of agencies and organisations. This study explores how on‐the‐ground crisis response efforts align with crisis response guidelines. These guidelines are key to the effectiveness of crisis response. To this end, we construct, analyse and compare emergency response networks by using network analysis and natural language processing methods. Differences between plans and practice, that is, false positives (actions delivered but not prescribed) and false negatives (actions prescribed but not delivered), can impact response evaluation and policy revisions. We investigate collaboration networks at the federal, state and local level extracted from official documents (prescribed networks) and empirical data (observed networks) in the form of situational reports (n = 109) and tweets (n = 28,050) from responses to major hurricanes that made landfall in the United States. Our analyses reveal meaningful differences between prescribed and observed collaboration networks (mean node overlap ~9.94%, edge overlap ~3.94%). The observed networks most closely resemble federal‐level networks in terms of node and edge overlap, highlighting the prioritisation of federal response guidelines. We also observed a high ratio of false positives, that is, nongovernmental, nonprofit and volunteer organizations, that play a critical role in crisis response and are not mentioned in response plans. These findings enable us to evaluate the current best practices for response and inform emergency response policy planning.
The paper investigates changing levels of online concern about the Kashmiri Pandit migration of the 1990s on Twitter.
Although decades old, this movement of people is an ongoing issue in India, with no current resolution. Analysing changing reactions to it on social media may shed light on trends in public attitudes to the event. Tweets were downloaded
from Twitter using the academic version of its application programming interface (API) with the aid of the free social media analytics software Mozdeh. A set of 1000 tweets was selected for content analysis with a random number generator
in Mozdeh. The results show that the number of tweets about the issue has increased over time, mainly from India, and
predominantly driven by the release of films like Shikara and The Kashmir Files. The tweets show apparent universal support for the Pandits but often express strong emotions or criticize the actions of politicians, showing that the migration is
an ongoing source of anguish and frustration that needs resolution. The results also show that social media analysis can
give insights even into primarily offline political issues that predate the popularity of the web, and can easily incorporate
international perspectives necessary to understand complex migration issues.
Social media data provide increasing opportunities for the automated analysis of large sets of textual documents. So far, automated tools have been developed either to account for the social networks among participants in the debates, or to analyze the content of these debates. Less attention has been paid to mapping co‐occurrences of actors (participants) and topics (content) in online debates that can be considered as socio‐semantic networks. We propose a new, automated approach that uses the whole matrix of co‐addressed topics and actors for understanding and visualizing online debates. We show the advantages of the new approach with the analysis of two data sets: first, a large set of English‐language Twitter messages at the Rio + 20 meeting, in June 2012 (72,077 tweets), and second, a smaller data set of Dutch‐language Twitter messages on bird flu related to poultry farming in 2015–2017 (2,139 tweets). We discuss the theoretical, methodological, and substantive implications of our approach, also for the analysis of other social media data.
The immense growth of the social Web, which has made a large amount of user data easily and publicly available, has opened a whole new spectrum for research in social behavioral sciences. However, as the volume of social media content increases at a very fast rate, it becomes extremely difficult to systematically obtain high-level information from this data. As a consequence, tasks related to the analysis of historical news events based on social media data have not been explored, which limits any type of comparative historical research, causality analysis, and discovery of knowledge from patterns extracted from aggregated social media event information. In this work, we target this issue by proposing a compact high-level representation of news events using social media information. This representation explicitly includes temporal information about the event and information about locations, in particular of geopolitical entities. We call this a spatio-temporal context-aware event representation. Our hypothesis is that by including social, temporal, and spatial information in the event representation, we are enabling the analysis of historical world news from a social and geopolitical perspective. This facilitates, new information retrieval tasks related to historical event information extraction and international relations analysis. We support our claims by presenting two applications of this idea: the first, a visual tool, named Galean, for retrieval and exploration of historical news events within their geopolitical and temporal context. The second, a quantitative analysis of a 2-year Twitter dataset of news events reported by U.S. and U.K. media, which we explore using data mining techniques on our event representations. We present two case studies of event exploration using Galean and user evaluation of this tool, as well as details of our data mining empirical results.
By focusing on the recent events in the Middle East, that have pushed many to flee and seek refuge in neighboring countries or in Europe, we investigate dynamics of label use in social media, the emergent patterns of labeling that can cause further disaffection and tension, and the sentiments associated with the different labels. To achieve this, we examine key labels pertaining to the refugee/migrant crisis and their usage in the user comment thread of a highly viewed and informational video of the crisis on YouTube. The use of labels indicate that migration issues are being framed not only through labels characterizing the crisis but also by their describing the individuals themselves. The sentiments associated with these labels depart from what one would normally expect; in particular, negative sentiment is attached to labels that would otherwise be deemed neutral or positive. Interestingly, both positive and negative labels exhibit increased negativity across time. Using topic modeling and sentiment analysis jointly, we discover that the latent topics of the most positive comments show more overlap than those topics of the most negative comments, which are more focused and partitioned. In terms of sentiment, we find that labels indicating some degree of perceived agency or opportunity, such as 'migrant' or 'immigrant', are embedded in less sympathetic comments than those labels indicating a need to escape war-torn regions or persecution (e.g., asylum seeker or refugee). Our study offers valuable insights into the direction of public sentiment and the nature of discussions surrounding this significant societal event, as well as the nature of online opinion sharing.
In present research, the authors examined how social media influencers affect the overall sentiment of a topic. To this end, they utilized supervised machine learning approach to develop SentiRobo for measuring the sentiment score of social media content. In the next stage, they studied social media datasets with 375,141 records in the education domain to investigate the correlation between social media topics and top authors' sentiment. The Pearson correlation test results revealed that top one percent of social media authors are enough to significantly influence the whole sentiment of each topic.
Adopting a socio-semantic perspective, this study aims to verify the relation between social influence and discourse similarity networks in workgroups and explore its modification over time. Data consist of video transcripts of 45 3-h group meetings and weekly sociometric questionnaires. Relation between tie strength, actor centrality within the influence network, and shared elements of discourse between group members are examined over time. Observed correlations support the hypothesis of a relation between social influence and discourse similarity. Changes over time suggest a similarity threshold above which the relation between similarity and influence is reversed.
This paper explores the relations between social ties and cultural constructs in small groups. The analysis uses cross-sectional data comprising both social networks within three art groups and semantic networks based on verbal expressions of their members. We examine how positions of actors in the intragroup social networks associate with the properties of cultural constructs they create jointly with other group members accounting for different roles actors play in collective culture constructing. We find that social popularity rather hinders sharing of cultural concepts, while those individuals who socially bridge their groups come to share many concepts with others. Moreover, focusing and, especially, integration of cultural constructs, rather than mere ‘thickness’ of those, accompany intense interactions between the leaders and the followers.
Emotions are important in communication to effectively convey messages and to understand reactions to messages. Large scale studies of communication need methods to detect sentiment in order to investigate or model the processes involved. This chapter describes the sentiment strength detection program SentiStrength that was developed during the CyberEmotions project to detect the strength of sentiments expressed in social web texts. SentiStrength uses a lexical approach that exploits a list of sentiment-related terms and has rules to deal with standard linguistic and social web methods to express sentiment, such as emoticons, exaggerated punctuation and deliberate misspellings. This chapter also describes how SentiStrength can be refined for particular topics and contexts and how variants can be created for different languages. The chapter also briefly describes some studies that have applied SentiStrength to analyse trends in Twitter and You Tube comments.