ABSTRACT
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.
- Christiane Amanpour and Thom Patterson. 2015. Passport linked to terrorist complicates Syrian refugee crisis. (nov 2015). http://edition.cnn.com/2015/11/15/ europe/paris-attacks-passports/index.htmlGoogle Scholar
- Younggue Bae and Hongchul Lee. 2012. Sentiment analysis of twitter audiences: Measuring the positive or negative influence of popular twitterers. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 63, 12 (2012), 2521--2535. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nikita Basov, Ju-Sung Lee, and Artem Antoniuk. 2016. Social Networks and Construction of Culture: A Socio-Semantic Analysis of Art Groups. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Complex Networks and their Applications. Springer, 785--796.Google Scholar
- Stephen P Borgatti and Martin G Everett. 1997. Network analysis of 2-mode data. Social networks 19, 3 (1997), 243--269.Google Scholar
- Stephen P. Borgatti, Ajay Mehra, Daniel J. Brass, and Giuseppe Labianca. 2009. Network Analysis in the Social Sciences. Science 323, 5916 (2009), 892--895.Google Scholar
- Benny Bornfeld, Sheizaf Rafaeli, and Daphne Ruth Raban. 2014. Electronic Wordof-mouth Spread in Twitter as a Function of the Message Sentiment. In Proceedings of The Fourth International Conference on Social Eco-Informatics. IARIA.Google Scholar
- Dennis Chong and J James N. Druckman. 2007. Framing theory. Annual Review of Political Science 10 (2007), 103--126.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Nicholas A. Diakopoulos and David A. Shamma. 2010. Characterizing debate performance via aggregated twitter sentiment. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 1195--1198. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jana Diesner, Amirhossein Aleyasen, Jinseok Kim, Shubhanshu Mishra, and Kiumars Soltani. 2013. Using socio-semantic network analysis for assessing the impact of documentaries. In Proceedings of theWorkshop of Information in Networks. New York, 1--5.Google Scholar
- James N Druckman. 2011. What's it all about? Framing in political science. In Perspectives on framing, G Keren (Ed.). Psychology Press, New York, 279--302.Google Scholar
- Robert M Entman. 1993. Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication 43, 4 (1993), 50--58.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Marguerite Feitlowitz. 2011. A lexicon of terror: Argentina and the legacies of torture, revised and updated with a new epilogue. Oxford University Press, New York.Google Scholar
- Linton C Freeman. 1979. Centrality in social networks conceptual clarification. Social Networks 1, 3 (1979), 215--239.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Erving Goffman. 1974. Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Harvard University Press, New York.Google Scholar
- Alfonso Gonzales. 2013. Reform without justice: Latino migrant politics and the homeland security state. Oxford University Press, New York.Google Scholar
- Kirk Hallahan. 1999. Seven Models of Framing: Implications for Public Relations. Journal of Public Relations Research 11, 3 (1999), 205--242.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Iina Hellsten and Loet Leydesdorff. 2017. Automated Analysis of Topic-Actor Networks on Twitter: New approach to the analysis of socio-semantic networks. (2017), 1--31. arXiv:1711.08387 http://arxiv.org/abs/1711.08387Google Scholar
- Geraldine Henderson, Dawn Iacobucci, and Bobby J Calder. 1998. Brand diagnostics: mapping branding effects using consumer associative networks. European Journal of Operational Research 111, 1998 (1998), 306--327.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Seth M Holmes. 2011. Structural vulnerability and hierarchies of ethnicity and citizenship on the farm. Medical Anthropology 30, 4 (2011), 425--449.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Seth M. Holmes and Heide Castañeda. 2016. Representing the "European refugee crisis" in Germany and beyond: Deservingness and difference, life and death. American Ethnologist 43, 1 (2016), 12--24.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Justin Huggler. 2016. German mayor beaten up by mob after expressing support for asylum seekers. (sep 2016). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/30/ german-mayor-beaten-up-by-mob-after-expressing-support-for-asylu/Google Scholar
- Dawn Iacobucci, Geraldine Henderson, Alberto Marcati, and Jennifer Chang. 1996. Network analyses of brand switching behavior. International Journal of Research in Marketing 13 (1996), 415--429.Google ScholarCross Ref
- S Iyengar. 1987. Television News and Citizens' Explanations of National Affairs. American Political Science Review 81 (1987), 815--831. Issue 3Google ScholarCross Ref
- Silia Klepp. 2013. Europeanisation Spot. An Ethnography of the Frontex Nautilus II Mission. Journal of Peace and Conflict Research 2, 1 (2013), 36--69.Google Scholar
- Ju-Sung Lee and Adina Nerghes. 2017. Labels and sentiment in social media: On the role of perceived agency in online discussions of the refugee crisis. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Social Media & Society. ACM, New York, 1--10. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Joel H Levine. 1979. Joint-space analysis of "pick-any" data: analysis of choices from an unconstrained set of alternatives. Psychometrika 44, 1 (1979), 85--92.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Brendan O'Connor, Ramnath Balasubramanyan, Bryan R Routledge, and Noah A Smith. 2010. From tweets to polls: Linking text sentiment to public opinion time series.. In Proceedings of the Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. AAAI, 122--129.Google Scholar
- Tore Opsahl. 2013. Triadic closure in two-mode networks: Redefining the global and local clustering coefficients. Social Networks 35, 2 (2013), 159--167.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Zhongdang Pan and Gerald M Kosicki. 1993. Framing analysis: An approach to news discourse. Political Communication 10, 1 (1993), 55--75.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Chang Sup Park and Barbara K Kaye. 2017. The tweet goes on: Interconnection of Twitter opinion leadership, network size, and civic engagement. Computers in Human Behavior 69 (2017), 174--180. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Vanessa Peña-Araya, Mauricio Quezada, Barbara Poblete, and Denis Parra. 2017. Gaining historical and international relations insights from social media: spatiotemporal real-world news analysis using Twitter. EPJ Data Science (2017), 25.Google Scholar
- James W Pennebaker, Martha E Francis, and Roger J Booth. 2001. Linguistic inquiry and word count: LIWC 2001. Technical Report 2001. Austin, TX. http: //www.LIWC.netGoogle Scholar
- Meg J Rohan. 2000. A rose by any name? The values construct. Personality and Social Psychology Review 4, 3 (2000), 255--277.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Vala Ali Rohani, Shahid Shayaa, and Ghazaleh Babanejaddehaki. 2017. How Social Media Influencers Govern Sentiment Territory. International Journal of Applied Evolutionary Computation (IJAEC) 8, 1 (2017), 49--60. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Camille Roth. 2013. Socio-semantic frameworks. Advances in Complex Systems 16, 04n05 (2013), 1350013.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Camille Roth and Jean-Philippe Cointet. 2010. Social and semantic coevolution in knowledge networks. Social Networks 32, 1 (2010), 16--29.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Johanne Saint-Charles and Pierre Mongeau. 2018. Social influence and discourse similarity networks in workgroups. Social Networks 52 (2018), 228--237.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Stefan Stieglitz and Linh Dang-Xuan. 2011. The Role of Sentiment in Information Propagation on Twitter--An Empirical Analysis of Affective Dimensions in Political Tweets. In Proceedings of the 22nd Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS), Sydney (Australia). Retrieved from: http://aisel. aisnet. org/acis, Vol. 38.Google Scholar
- Texifier. 2018. (2018). https://texifter.comGoogle Scholar
- Mike Thelwall. 2013. Heart and soul: Sentiment strength detection in the social web with SentiStrength. Proceedings of the CyberEmotions (2013), 1--14.Google Scholar
- Andranik Tumasjan, Timm Oliver Sprenger, Philipp G Sandner, and Isabell M Welpe. 2010. Predicting elections with twitter: What 140 characters reveal about political sentiment. In Proceedings of the Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Vol. 10. AAAI, 178--185.Google Scholar
- Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust. 1994. Social network analysis: Methods and applications. Vol. 24. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
- Kristin Yarris and Heide Castaneda. 2014. Ethnographic insights on displacement, migration, and deservingness in contemporary global contexts. International Migration 53 (2014), 644--69. Issue 3.Google Scholar
Recommendations
What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?
WWW '10: Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide webTwitter, a microblogging service less than three years old, commands more than 41 million users as of July 2009 and is growing fast. Twitter users tweet about any topic within the 140-character limit and follow others to receive their tweets. The goal ...
Twitter under crisis: can we trust what we RT?
SOMA '10: Proceedings of the First Workshop on Social Media AnalyticsIn this article we explore the behavior of Twitter users under an emergency situation. In particular, we analyze the activity related to the 2010 earthquake in Chile and characterize Twitter in the hours and days following this disaster. Furthermore, we ...
A sentiment analysis of audiences on twitter: who is the positive or negative audience of popular twitterers?
ICHIT'11: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Convergence and hybrid information technologyMicroblogging is a new informal communication medium of blogging that differs from a traditional blog in which content is much shorter. Microbloggers post about topics that describe their current status. Twitter is a popular microblogging service and ...
Comments